The UK’s biggest-selling daily newspaper, The Sun, is launching a new holiday deals platform in January, claiming there is “still a gap in the market for another holiday deals platform”.
The site, TheSunHolidays.com, which will sit outside The Sun’s subscription model, will launch on January 5 following a four-week promotional campaign in the paper starting on December 19.
News UK’s head of travel, Victoria Sanders, said: “The Sun has six million readers every day. They trust us and we want to give repay them with good value deals. Our new TheSunHolidays site will offer travel companies phenomenal distribution to holiday-loving, bargain-hunting, deal-loving British consumers.
“We did a lot of research before launching this and discovered that Sun readers take on average three holidays a year, two of them overseas. We’ve been sending people away to UK holidays parks for £9.50 for 25 years and are, in fact, the UK’s largest sellers of short-breaks. But this is the first time we have done anything like this.”
Sanders, former managing director of Teletext Holidays, will work with a limited number of partners initially to key destinations like Spain, Greece and Turkey. She also expects to sell lots of cruise which she said was really popular in recent years via the print newspaper.
Agents and operators can load deals will can be searched via destination or via categories such as ‘beach’, ‘family’, ‘young & lively’ or ‘long-haul’. The deals will be listed with the most recently-posted deal at the top.
There will also be a ‘Sun Exclusives’ tab, featuring time-sensitive offers, including discounts, Buy One Get One Frees and value added extras.
Sanders explained the site would also feature editorial content from The Sun travel editor Lisa Minot and her contributors, and the plan is to promote the offers through “a tie-up between print, digital and email, all pushing readers online.
The launch was announced by Sanders at last night’s Travolution Awards which TheSunHolidays.com was headline sponsor for.