Skift Take
6 years after joining the Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia brand names within Expedia Group, the business is now undertaking the grand experiment to distinguish their worth proposals and target markets. If it doesn’t work, brand consultants never ever get tired of providing their recommendations.
Dennis Schaal, Skift
With 10 approximately online travel bureau brand names in the fold, Expedia Group is busy redefining and identifying them to focus on key clients, and to prevent excessive unproductive overlap.
That’s one factor Expedia Group recently relaunched Orbitz with a concentrate on the LGBTQIA+ market. It’s part of Expedia’s larger effort to retool its patchwork of online travel agency brand names, all of which came its way through acquisitions over a number of years.
Whether it’s online travel bureau or hotel brand names, separating material and target audiences is a challenge for companies throughout the spectrum, whether it be in travel or other industries.
“We have actually relaunched our Orbitz brand with a concentrate on LGBTQIA+,” Expedia Group CEO Peter Kern informed financiers last month. “Which’s sort of, again, a push as we try to differentiate brands and actually focus each brand on who their market is.”
Orbitz, which has a history of LGBTQ advocacy and declares to be the first online travel bureau to mention “gay travel” on its pages in 2002, got a revamped pride microsite in April, in the nick of time for Pride Month in June. Tourists can look for hotels on Orbitz that signed an inclusion pledge.
Henry Harteveldt of Environment Research Group explained the Orbitz relaunch as a “very first” in regards to a general-purpose online travel bureau concentrating on LGBTQ clients as its primary audience.
“That is a lightening bolt,” Harteveldt stated. “We have actually never ever seen anybody take a traditional brand name and refocus its marketing toward the LGBTQ community.”
However the level of that focus and its period will be a work in progress. The default hotel search on Orbitz isn’t LGBTQ-specific; travelers navigate to the pride microsite to search for LGBTQ-welcoming hotels.
“Orbitz will need to market this strongly enough so the message breaks through the clutter,” Harteveldt stated.
The Orbitz relaunch did indeed come with a modest advertising campaign.
“We did a lot of qualitative and quantitative research in 2015 leading up to the launch of ‘Travel As You Are'” and the insight that drove this campaign was an easy one: For many LGBTQIA tourists, feeling safe and accepted is still the exception, not the norm,” an Expedia Group spokesperson said. “As an online travel service provider, we’re offering info and resources that help travelers experience the world on their terms. And as a brand name, it means being their advocate and showing up for the causes they care about.”
Noting that the “LGBTQ community is often undetectable in travel marketing,” Harteveldt like the inclusiveness, timing, and lack of uniqueness in the Orbitz advertising campaign style, “Travel as you are.” With individuals thinking of and taking a trip again, Orbitz was smart to release the ad campaign when it did, he said.
When it concerned TV advertising in June, though, Expedia Group’s priorities were with Expedia.com, Hotels.com, and Vrbo, according to iSpot.tv. In addition to these 3 brand names, Booking Holdings’ Priceline, and also Airbnb, ranked among the leading 5 online travel sites in advertising invest– Orbitz wasn’t amongst them. Orbitz didn’t publicize prospective spend through other channels, nor the overall cost of the campaign.
Expedia’s Trip-Maximizers
Meanwhile, the group’s flagship Expedia.com brand just recently carried out its largest marketing project in years to recast itself as being targeted in part towards “trip maximizers.” In Expedia lingo, that suggests “the traveler who wants to be engaged by possibilities, now more than ever, needs to be supported throughout their journey,” according to the business.
Sis online travel bureau Travelocity is dedicated to a new focus on U.S. families with kids, including targeting Hispanic households with Spanish-language TV areas.
Rachel Shin, a Travelocity, spokeswoman, said the business doesn’t think about the brand name tweaks a full-fledged rebrand. “We do not envision alienating any of our existing customers but instead are working to simplify and refocus our interactions strategies to much better resonate with household and Hispanic household travelers,” Shin said. “Our total objective is to end up being the most relied on and household friendly travel website.”
This indicates that Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity, as soon as bitter rivals but now organized under Expedia Group ownership, all got brand tweaks to varying degrees. This is taking place about six years after they were unified.
In addition, Expedia’s Cheaptickets brand is currently being modified to stress students and younger travelers since, after all, more youthful people tend to like “low-cost.”
Expedia positions Hotels.com, with a benefits program that grants a totally free night for each 10 stays, as being for regular tourists, and Vrbo’s sweet spot is for complex household travel, primarily for remain in whole-home getaway leasings.
Differentiation Hotels Versus Online Travel Agencies
In some ways, it is simpler to distinguish hotel brands than online travel bureau, Atmosphere’s Harteveldt argued.
Hotel properties have actually geographic constraints composed into their agreements, he stated, so Marriott International’s Renaissance and Sheraton homes in theory would not be vying for the same consumers in a given place, Harteveldt stated.
But, Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, Cheaptickets, and Hotels.com do not have legal barriers that would forbid them from taking each others’ customers.
With their products having frustrating overlap, Expedia Group is hoping that marketing and a restored focus will be difference-makers.