The Sno Group has expanded its portfolio to offer beach holidays to its clients, with plans to enter the cruise sector next year and expand into other global markets.
Beach holidays can now be found on the ski specialist’s website, with a new sunset image, morphing from the Sno Group’s snowflake logo.
Group chief executive Richard Sinclair, who founded Sno in 2010, said: “The decision to expand from being a ski specialist into beach holidays came as requests grew from loyal customers to help them find and book their summer holidays too.
“We have very high repeat business and recommendations, and we work hard to give clients the best possible experience.
“Helping them to book their other travel, beyond the annual ski holiday, was a natural progression.
“We’re not planning to launch a separate brand or website, because it’s our existing Sno clients who persuaded us to expand into a new niche of travel.
“I suspect we’ll keep growing the brand when we enter the cruise niche of travel next year too.”
He said Sno offers more than one million package ski holidays and catered chalet deals “to slice and dice to find your perfect trip”.
“We can do this because, while we tailor-make holidays for clients, we also book a lot as an agent of other ski operators,” he said.
“Research showed us that the beach holiday market is quite different.
“To sell the whole beach market and still be price-competitive, we chose to build our own dynamic-packaging software.
“As we grow from ski, into other niches of travel, we’ll use the same model of online travel agency with a call centre.
“We’re a more high-touch business than the big UK beach online travel agencies so it will be interesting to meet the challenge of maintaining that customer connection and obsession.
“We’ll be dynamic packaging, just like the biggest OTAs in the UK, but also selling the packages of our favourite operators alongside.
“This mixed model of agent and operator has helped us grow fast in the ski niche and we think we can port that over to beach, albeit with a higher percentage of dynamic packaging.”
The group will feature most destinations, including every island in the Caribbean, all the “big hitters” in Europe, the US and the Indian Ocean, plus key destinations in Asia and the Middle East.
“Because we’re following our existing client base, initially we’re targeting ABC1 and to that end are mostly focused on four and five-star accommodation plus occasional three-star where highly rated,” he added.
He said the USP “remains the same as in ski, that of both agent and operator combined”, offering independent advice, helping clients choose the elements they want within an Atol-protected holidays.
“As it says on our holidays page, ‘decide your dream destination, pick the perfect hotel, bag the best flights and we’ll add the Atol’,” he added.
Sno Group saw record turnover for 2022-23 and this year has been ahead of that level for every month since April.
“The ski market has softened since September, but skiers are a passionate lot and we expect to see the same pattern of a strong lates market that beach has benefitted from,” said Sinclair.
He said the dynamic packaging technology has been developed and fund internally, although it was delayed amid the pandemic.
“We have soft-launched the new beach product, in order to live-test and refine the customer experience, and there’s more to improve,” said Sinclair.
“While we gently build momentum in beach, we’ll be focussed first and foremost on ski as the main winter season approaches.
“We’ll grow marketing spend on beach once we’re satisfied with refining the user experience.”
Asked about passenger targets for beach, he said: “We’re ambitious but prefer to set micro and short-term goals, then iterate.
“Let’s book our first thousand – make sure they have a great experience, and get our processes optimised. Then scale.
“We’re naturally interested in cruise, as this area has been a great success for another ski specialist, but we want to get beach right first as it’s the biggest niche of travel and translates well into other customer markets.
“We’re sno.co.uk but our ambitions are global.
“We already book customers from the US, Australia and South Africa from our UK website but, to take the internationalisation of Sno to the next level, we have acquired sno.com for the US market and the ‘SNO’ tld [top-level domain] for most of the world’s biggest economies – sno.de and sno.es etc.”
To support Sno’s internationalisation plans, it has also migrated to a “headless” CMS, which enables the company to handle multiple languages and multiple websites/domains.
“We expect to launch the US website next year,” added Sinclair.