Travel clubs have started gaining significant interest to bond customers to a company and instill loyalty. Hailed as a passionate loyalty program to attract and sustain customer interest, travel clubs have emerged as a legitimate business tactic for direct selling companies.
With the onset of the pandemic and lockdown restrictions in 2020, many companies worldwide were striving to find new ways to keep their customers engaged and happy. Travel clubs allowed them to incorporate additional features and loyalty rewards that appealed to customers in a big way. As the travel sector recovered in 2021, the travel club concept piqued the interest of top e-commerce players, direct sellers, B2C retailers, financial institutions and media subscription services. As travel sales continued their meteoric rise, travel clubs started gaining steam as a powerful customer retention strategy.
Travel clubs curate and maximize the loyalty experience for direct selling companies and their stakeholders by offering end-to-end loyalty solutions across multiple touchpoints. With an extensive supply of benefits and rewards, travel clubs encourage recurring engagement and revenue and helpdirect selling companies encourage loyalty among their buyers.
The 1:1 marketing strategies used by direct selling companies can be further enhanced by leveraging database technology to establish personalized communication with customers. Travel loyalty rewards tie customers to a particular brand by offering special attention and value, resulting in enhanced loyalty. With features like tiered benefits, the option to earn and redeem rewards, experiential incentives and more, travel clubs reach beyond the older transactional loyalty programs with an ongoing and valued offer.
Innovation and Customer Loyalty
Incorporating travel club benefits and features makes members feel special and valued. In recent times, attention-starved millennials and Gen-Zs accounted for a huge chunk of travel customers. By differentiating sets of customers, travel clubs can help direct selling companies customize interactions as well as rewards to connect on a more personal level.
Customers now expect their loyalty program to understand and predict their needs. They expect convenience and personalized rewards to make their travel experience more enjoyable. Utilizing customer data and marketing insights intelligently, companies can create meaningful experiences for their members through their travel club platform.
Reimagining Loyalty and Marketing Strategy
The exclusive benefits of travel clubs go beyond flight, hotels, car rentals, and freebies. Businesses can customize their travel club based on their business objectives or changing preferences to make it more impactful. They can give their most loyal and top-tier members dedicated concierge service or value-added benefits to empower them.
To nurture the relationship with lower-tier members, they can share personalized recommendations and intentional upgrades to keep them engaged and boost them into higher tiers. With the data-led innovations offered by a travel club, businesses also have access to everyday transactions and loyalty data. This can be leveraged to remove silos and create an end-to-end customer experience across every loyalty interaction.
Tailored Experiences
By customizing loyalty interactions, direct selling companies can deliver a more dynamic experience to their customers. The data analytics and real-time insights about member engagement and promotion performance can be tracked and modified to be more proactive. It is suddenly easy to predict when the customer is looking for a holiday or new benefits. Targeted promotions and recommendations can be utilized to reignite their experience.
Using these data insights, companies can act on customer needs and preferences. Customers can share tailored travel packages based on their browsing interest, send text messages asking for car rentals during foreign travel or access add-ons such as high-speed Wi-Fi on their hotel stay. These experiential rewards make customers feel valued and keep the brand on top of their minds each time they book.
Reward and Engage
Travel club rewards are customizable to stay relevant to your brand and business goals. They are not limited to just travel but can also encompass a wide range of lifestyle benefits for everyday customers to ensure that they stay engaged throughout the year.
With a powerful engagement program, travel club benefits lead to meaningful interactions. Following the pandemic, rewards like ‘Doc-In-A-Suitcase’ and ‘Medi-Jet Services’ really appealed to all kinds of travelers. Such reward benefits make the travel club more than just a loyalty club and can foster an emotional bond with the customers at every touchpoint throughout their purchase journey. Additionally, the 24/7 superior customer experience will set your brand apart from the competitors.
The variety and depth of travel and lifestyle benefits offered by a travel club, along with the opportunities to earn and redeem rewards, will help create a differentiated experience for customers and stakeholders. The pandemic has, and is, testing the trust and confidence of every brand out there, so traditional direct selling companies can leverage the travel club in non-traditional ways to instill life-long loyalty.
Customer Feedback
Using a state-of-the-art CRM, forward-thinking businesses can share surveys with their customers and gather valuable feedback. This information can be intelligently processed using the latest technological tools to gain insights and then design relevant marketing campaigns. By measuring the success of these promotions, offerings can be tweaked with corresponding revenue growth.
As a result, travel clubs offer companies an affordable solution to grow revenue in the long term. As your loyal customers grow, the cost of serving them decreases. Also, loyal customers are more likely to pass on word-of-mouth recommendations that further improve profitability.
Over the past few years, an increasing number of direct selling companies, e-commerce brands, B2C retailers, and franchises have jumped onto the travel club bandwagon with an intentional approach to gain share and increase their revenue. By being able to connect with customers in more personalized ways, the travel club offers a unique opportunity to counter the challenges offered by today’s travel and hospitality industry.
How to Start a Travel Club
Launching a travel club on your own can be a costly and time-consuming project. Fortunately, a better option now exists through white-label travel club platforms. Widely recognized and awarded by travel industry peers as the “World’s Best Travel Club Builder,” Custom Travel Solutions makes the process quick and easy.
