Abraham Alapatt, Chief Innovation Officer and Head - Marketing & Service Quality, Thomas Cook India, talks about the company’s strategy of using integrated offerings to gain market-share in the travel and travel-services segment, adding that its USP is the ability to cater to customers’ online as well as offline requirements, and the hybrid space in between
By Saloni Dutta
Where do things stand for Thomas Cook India in the travel and tourism industry, with pressures to compete with online players in the domain?
The market is enormous and growing very fast. We typically offer our services to the large number of people rising from lower middle class to middle class - which is about the size of a small country in Europe, in population terms – every year. The market is large enough already and getting bigger, so there is enough room. From a market-share and value point of view, you have to be competitive, and it does pay to be a trusted brand like we are. The fact that we have an enviable reputation in both the travel and foreign exchange space and that we are an integrated service-provider, offering every service in the house, is the differentiator. So while we are still an aggregator of services, we are a larger provider of services at each of these aggregate business levels. Whether offline or online, our attempt is to be able to give customers a seamless opportunity.
About 10 years ago, people said that we would be out of business, when the Online Travel Services (OTS) came up. But while a lot of research for travel takes place online, a lot of the fulfilment, especially tickets, is offline - so unless you have an extensive branch network like we do, the physical conversion of that larger value, or more profitable business end, which is the holiday portion, is not happening. Flight tickets are increasingly low-cost carrier - there is no commission to be made. So what happens then is that you are showing the sale, but there is very little profitability there. Hence our focus has been on selling integrated holidays, flights included and that has paid off well. The hybrid model that we have –the ability to serve pure click, pure brick and everything in between, i.e., the hybrid space - is really where the opportunity is.
How does your new campaign ‘#HolidaySortedHai’ take the brand forward?
The positioning is sound, built on the insight that anybody who has planned an international holiday for the family knows how difficult and stressful it can be. You never really relax until you come back from the holiday, by which time the opportunity to relax has actually ended and you are back to work. We worked on that insight and aimed to take the pain out of preparing, which should be the most fun time of your life, and bring in the fact that we offer every aspect of services for the holiday in a seamless way. The film delivered that conversation well, and that it is all aligned with one service portal - ThomasCook.in. The primary need was to drive home the familiarity for the url. Our traffic and transactions have grown considerably. We are establishing ourselves in the click space as well, after the brick space.
What is the media mix that you will employ to implement your marketing strategy?
We actually did the first transition in Print, the most traditional of media. We started advertising the kit as a service from ThomasCook.in, rather than just Thomas Cook. A small but critical first step is to get people used to seeing ThomaCook.in for our digital presence and also to start getting the visibility up for the url. We did a variation of the logo, which is completely url-driven, and for almost a year now, we have been leading from ThomasCook.in. The TVC was the first big bang visibility effort, ably supported with cinema timed with the three big releases for the month, and we were pretty much in all the multiplex screens across the country. Online too, we did quite a bit – YouTube, for example, has given us more than 3.5 lakh viewers - so it is a channel by itself. We also created a contest on Facebook asking people to share funny experiences when they had not sorted out their holiday, and got them talking about it. We started this on Twitter as well, and it trended at an India level. The idea has got legs, it works well with the brand, and we are looking at ways to extend this conversation across media, not just in traditional advertising where we can control the message, but actually encourage conversations with customers where we are saying ‘Talk to us to sort your holiday out’.
How has the profile of your clientele changed over a period of time?
The segments are becoming clearer today. Earlier, the bulk of what we did was Group Inclusive Tour (GIT); today, we see far more defined customer segments emerging. There are special interests which are very clear. People are leading with experiences, they are no longer saying I want to go to these destinations and see these places , they are actually starting the conversation with I want to do these things, so which is the best place to go. There are specific themes emerging, and people are going to places for a reason, like running marathons, wildlife photography, an all-women group travelling, etc.
Going ahead, what is Thomas Cook’s agenda to serve the click space better?
We are taking digital into our marketing in many ways, and advertising is just one part of it. Starting with product design, trying to create simple, easy to understand, easy to package, off-the-shelf kind of products, typically for short haul, impulsive young customers who might decide on a holiday seeing the next weekend is a long weekend. So how do we give them a package for an overseas or a domestic holiday that is all inclusive for destinations, typically a visa-on-arrival, visa in 24 hours kind of a destination, and actually allow them to buy it online? Even if someone walks in physically, how do we bring in technology and interactiveness to the experience? As opposed to a boring brochure that we used to hand out earlier, today we have a Thomas Cook salesperson sitting in front of the customer with a tablet and walking him through a conversation, identifying destination and other preferences in a holiday, understanding the budget, number of people travelling, and from the back end, we pull up options showing a day-by-day itinerary, things to do, kind of hotel, pictures, videos, stuff like that, making it a more interactive experience.
Marketing Tip
The customer’s point of view is what matters, and the communication should be targeted to him.
CMO File
Abraham Alapatt, Chief Innovation Officer and Head - Marketing & Service Quality, Thomas Cook India is a marketing and brand professional with over 17 years of full-time professional experience at senior strategic levels across varied domains of brand building. At Thomas Cook, his mandate is to lead the Group’s brand-building efforts as well as support and grow individual lines of business in line with existing and emerging opportunities. He has worked with organizations like Ogilvy & Mather, an international Internet solution-provider start-up, Reliance Mutual Fund and Development Credit Bank. His last assignment (prior to joining Thomas Cook India) was with Future Generali India. Alapatt is an MBA in Marketing & International Marketing from the School of Communication & Management Studies, Cochin.
About the Brand
Thomas Cook (India) Ltd (TCIL) is an integrated travel and travel-related financial services company offering a broad spectrum of services that include foreign exchange, corporate travel, MICE, leisure travel, insurance, visa & passport services and e-business. The company set up its first office in India in 1881. TCIL’s footprint currently extends to over 233 locations (including 23 airport counters) in 94 cities across India, Mauritius & Sri Lanka and is supported by a strong partner network of 115 Gold Circle Partners and 112 Preferred Sales Agents in over 130 cities across India. TCIL is promoted by Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited through its wholly-owned subsidiary, Fairbridge Capital (Mauritius) Limited and its controlled affiliates.
Facts
Creative Agency –
Feedback: saloni.dutta@exchange4media.com
