Cheapflights, the travel price comparison website, is running a campaign on the new Virgin Media portal to promote its popular newsletter. The promotion, which has been planned and bought by Harvest Digital, offers visitors the chance to win a £2,000 holiday and the opportunity to sign up to receive the Cheapflights newsletter. The creative, also produced by Harvest Digital, features an airport departure board featuring holidays to exotic world-wide destinations.
Travel experts on the Cheapflights newsletter team spend their days searching for the best fares available in the industry, saving travellers valuable time in planning their holidays. Along with these hand-picked deals, up-to-the-minute travel news, articles, sales alerts and travel tips are emailed weekly or whenever great deals are on so that customers won’t miss out on a bargain.
The campaign is part of an ongoing media trial that has seen Cheapflights test a mix of rich media and standard formats on AOL, together with a range of activity on relevant directories and travel verticals.
Commenting on the campaign, Cheapflights’ Head of Online Marketing Shahin Fard says: ‘We want to see the effects that display advertising combined with a competition to a targeted audience has on generating quality newsletter signups. We will monitor the activity of these new registrants over a reasonable period to determine the success of the campaign. We chose Harvest because of the agency’s experience in the travel sector and their creative approach to media-buying.”
Harvest Digital recently conducted extensive research into the online travel market in conjunction with Nielsen//NetRatings and Adviva which revealed that 55% of internet users book holidays online whilst only 7% of internet users book on the high street, and that two thirds of internet users take two or more holidays a year.
Online travel booking and research is especially common for 25 - 34 year olds, and for people booking within four weeks of their departure date and in both cases 68% of people would book directly on the Internet. The survey also revealed that three quarters of people book their own holidays with no major differences in the travel booking habits of men and women.