GroupDealTravel is a platform that makes organizing group trips with friends easy. Users can create trips, invite friends, and collectively decide on destinations, dates, and book group deals. The target market is 18-40 year old Europeans who take 2 group trips per year. Marketing strategies include channel partnerships with related websites, developing smart device apps, and online advertising targeted at social networks and special events. Initial online advertising tests showed potential interest in deals but low engagement with trip planning tools.
1. Travelling with your friends.
Easy. Fun. Cheap.
Holidays with your friends made easy: Social planning process, trip sharing,
cheaper group rates and exclusive deals
2. ● The Big Idea
● Target Market
● Existing Competitors
● Marketing Strategy
● Channel Partnerships
● Smart Device Segment
● Tests and conclusions
● Agenda
3. Organising a holidays with your friends is often a nightmare.
Sms, mail, pub nights, maybe a Facebook group are just the best
way to collect a lot of disorganized information and you end up
finding it too hard to understand the options liked by everybody.
And, when you finally get the crew together, why you should pay
the same price as you'd be travelling alone? You think you deserve
a discount for a 8 persons booking! We think the same.
● The Big Idea
4. In GroupDealTravel you can:
- Login and Create a trip
- Invite friends to the trip
- Insert the date, destination, budget, kind of trip… Or if you
are not sure. Organize in 5 seconds a polls to share the
decision with your friends
- Everybody can access the hotels and itinerary list and
select proposals. people can like the proposals, comment,
or ....dislike them!
- Access to amazing group deals based on your inputs and
Facebook profile.
- Easy planning process, a trip everybody like, and save
money for group deals.
● The Big Idea
5. GroupDealTravel User (initial target):
- Men and Women
- Aged between 18 and 40 years old
- Single or Married but without children
- Living in Western Europe
- Spending on average USD 2000 per year on holiday*
- Going on average 2 times per year on a group holiday with their -
friends*
- Whose group trips usually consist of city breaks or sports/ski trips
in Europe*
- Having access to internet and using online travel websites to
book their holidays
*Source: GroupDealTravel online survey
● Target Market
6. What can we do more?
● Simplification of the booking process
● Customized search options
● Easier integration and Social App Support
● Smart devices support
● Target particular events (University trips, stag/ hen trips...)
● Partnership with existing best dealers
● Offer group discounts
● Post booking integration ● Existing competitors
7. The Marketing Strategy of GroupDealTravel consists of:
● Channel Partnerships
● Exchanging traffic with websites that could be used by
GroupDealTravel potential users and that have moderate growth
● Examples: Myfriendshotel, Busabout, Wimdu…
● Smart Device platform
● Taking advantage of the growth of mobile travel bookings
● Taking the lead on travel applications for Windows phone
● Online advertising
● Leveraging on Social Networks (events targeted advertising)
● Google Ad Words
● Marketing Strategy
8. We use channel partnerships to exchange users traffic through recommendation/
advertising with other websites that people use when planning a group trip.
These websites include:
● Airlines, train and bus companies
● Travel guides
● Flat rental agencies
● Travel insurance companies
● Channel Partnerships
9. We classified the potential channel partners according to potential
benefit/ feasibility in the table below. We focus for our marketing
strategy on the potential partners listed in the boxes on the right
hand side.
.
● Channel Partnerships
10. ● Clearly, mobile is a channel with huge potential, but mobile
travel booking significantly lags behind mobile travel research.
eMarketer expects the gap to narrow slightly by 2016, but the
number of actual bookers still will be only half that of travel
researchers. The smart devices shipments are expected to pass
from the 1000M to 1900M within the 2016, so the presence and
support for that Media is clearly on the top priorities of Group
Deal Travel team.
● The Group and travel mission is making different considerations
on the way to land on the different ecosystems.
● The App need to be fully integrated with Social Network
platforms and other applications/partners already present on
the network.
● The Smart Devices Segment
13. We did 3 online campaigns on ad words with a budget of €5 per day:
Campaigns where redirecting to Landing page. 3 hypothesis were done:
H1: Targeting special events and groups. Shall we focus on this?
H2: Group Deal, putting emphasis on best deals?
H3: Travel Planner, putting emphasis on best planner tool?
Ad1 was published 9.099 times and clicked 3 times.(K: planning trip)
Ad2 was published 3.026 times and clicked 4 times.(K: deals for travel, trip deals, deals travel)
Ad3 was published 1.387 times and clicked 6 times.(K: deal travel, travel deals to, travel deal with)
The campaigns have not underlined special predilections by users, but the
“deals“ concept has been reinforced by its occurrence as keyword and in
Landing page usage.
CPC (cost per click) has revelled to be in the average of the publicitary compaigns in
google. CPC1 (1.06), CPC2(1.03), CPC3(0.82)
Group Planner or
Trips Deals emphasys
Testing 18-30 years segment for
specific activities ● Market Test 1: Ad Words
14. ***We received an excellent response regarding a specific part of our
proposition ("deals"). Those users browsed pages through the web site
(although not leaving an email address, part more focused on planning). CTR is
high (0.85€), and implies this a viable solution only when a high rate of high-
fees booking is reached (we need to work on partnerships)
*** Regarding the trip planner part we received low traffic, with no customer
subscription to the platform. Although the budget for this kind of campaign was
very low and the landing page probably still too basic , it helped to find
interesting insights from this experiment. It seems that, despite people might
like social trip planning, they are not really looking for it (in the same way
nobody was looking for twitter or Pinterest). We consider the option Google ads
might not be the best way to market this functionality. Trip planning/sharing
can be a powerful tool for customer retention and booking channel, but
probably it's more compatible with social recommendation campaigns(viral). A
strategy on this point is under study, and we are trying to identify niche markets
from where to start our next campaigns. Group Planner or
Tris Deals emphasys
● Market Test 1: Ad Words (results)
15. We did two online campaigns on Facebook with a budget of £5 per day:
●Men and Women between 18 and 40 years old living in the United Kingdom.
The campaign covered 23m potential users.
●Men and Women between 18 and 40 years old living in Western Europe and
like Travel(10M potential users).
*** Facebook ads are notoriously less clicked than google's ones, explained by
the fact people in facebook are not "looking for something" but are in more
'passive mode'. Anyway, although until now it was impossible to estimate the
benefits of Facebook ads for customer acquisition (no clicks), it remains a good
candidate to help us building the brand. We are now studying a campaign
focused on getting people's "likes" rather than access to the website.
● Market Test 2: Facebook Campaign