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Advantage to survey members over rollout of new branding
Advantage Travel Partnership plans to survey all its members before making a “strategic decision” on how to support agents to switch to its new branding.
The rebrand is the first major overhaul of the Advantage brand in more than 20 years and aims to leverage the brand to attract new members which “would not otherwise” have moved to the consortium.
The audit will determine how many travel agency members use the consortium’s brand and where they use it currently. Shop fascias with the current branding will need to be replaced with the new green branding, for example.
Consortium bosses pledged to support agents in the switchover but would not be drawn on the funding that would be available to members to do so.
More: Advantage Travel Partnership unveils first major rebrand in more than 20 years
Advantage Travel Partnership chief executive Julia Lo Bue-Said, who urged members to “embrace” the new brand, stressed it was a tactical, phased brand rollout rather than an “overnight change”.
She said: “We will do an audit and then take a strategic decision. We will review this and see what that need is.
“The audit is primarily to understand what we need to do. It’s the next part of the brand rollout.”
Announcing the rebrand at Advantage’s annual conference, Lo Bue-Said urged more members to use the consortium’s new logo to extend the consortium’s ‘reach’ and improve awareness of their own brands.
She told members: “This is your new brand - we encourage you to embrace its power, to harness its potential to amplify your own brand and to feel immense pride in being part of our collective global community.”
Afterwards she added: “I would like to think the rebrand would encourage more members to use the brand.”
She was also confident the overall rebrand would help the consortium grow turnover to £20 billion globally in the next two years from £17 billion currently.
Marketing director David Forder added that members had indicated in research that they were more likely to adopt the Advantage branding in some way if it was modernised.
He said: “A lot of members do already use the Advantage branding but the research we did said a lot of members would use it if it was more contemporary so we have taken that feedback on board. We will advocate members to get behind this.”
The consortium is targeting a 300% rise in travel agency searches on its new website in the 12 months following the rebrand.
The new site includes a new search facility for consumers to find a travel agent.
The consortium offered a ‘find an agent’ search facility on its previous site but the new search is more intuitive and easier to use in order to find a consumer’s nearest leisure agent or a corporate agent based on specialist requirements.
Forder added: “This is a completely new website. Our Find an Agent search wasn’t a great user experience and a lot of work has gone into making this a better fit for the site.
“We are looking to evolve it further in future and going forward we will include a better level of specialisation.”
He stressed there were still “plenty of people” who wanted to find a local agent to speak to them face to face.
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