A travel agency is attributing a 65% year-on-year rise in turnover in January to a last-minute voucher sent as a thank you to all clients who booked in 2024.
Within two weeks of emailing the ‘£100’ voucher to 2,500 clients on New Year’s Eve, the two-branch agency recorded the same value of bookings as it had made during the whole of January in 2024.
ArrangeMY Escape general manager Jennifer Lynch said she had been overwhelmed by the response, adding that many clients had spent more than planned because of the voucher.
“We have been inundated. The volumes have proved better than last year and the only thing we have done differently is the voucher,” she said, noting: “Customers have told us they are spending slightly more than they would have done because they have got £100 off.”
The voucher is valid for bookings with the majority of ArrangeMY Escape’s suppliers.
To use it, customers are required to spend a minimum of £2,500 per person and to book in January.
The £100 comes off the commission earned by the agency on every booking. Lynch said: “We didn’t send this out to get everyone to book – it was more that we wanted to say thank you to everyone who supported us in the past 12 months.
I was going to send it out before Christmas, but I think New Year was the right time, because people were over Christmas and thinking about holidays.”
The majority of bookings have been for this summer, with couples and families taking advantage of the discount.
Based on the response so far, Lynch was confident the extra bookings generated would cover the cost of the discounts.
“We have created more business than we would have done. Who’s to say that client was going to rebook with us if we hadn’t done this?” she said, adding the agency’s profits were 15% up on the same period last year.
Lynch is considering sending out similar discounts throughout the year.
“I’m going to do it at different times of year, as an incentive to get people who booked last Easter, for example, to rebook,” she said.