About the company
The Alpitour World Group considers the identity of its single brands (divided into the Tour Operator, Aviation, Hotel and resort, Travel Agency, Incoming, Incentive and Event and e-Commerce sectors) to be assets to safeguard and promote. Precisely for this reason, its punctual presence in every market segment is guaranteed by a broad network of specialized companies that follow the entire tourism supply chain step-by-step. It is this wide-spread and capillary presence that roots the Group strongly in the world of organized vacations, providing a solid base for the conquest of new spaces and incentives for the development and diversification of the business. Today, the Group has achieved a maturity and extent that make it the only 'multi-brand specialist' in the Italian tourism scene. Alpitour World continues to recreate itself and specialize, day after day, expanding its offerings to stay ever closer to its clients and, on every occasion, guaranteeing superior quality and immediate assistance.
The need to fulfil and anticipate tourists' desires has made it necessary to test new sales channels, including the online channel and, for the first time, the Group approached consumers directly with a travel portal that offers all the Alpitour, Francorosso, Villaggi Bravo, Volando, Karambola and Jeans branded vacations with both the packaged-vacation formula and offerings of just flights, hotels, weekends, vacation homes and gifts. Alpitourworld.com is the only travel portal in Italy that sells in real-time, providing access to its own online availability through very sophisticated proprietary software that allows clients to construct a personalized vacation.
The challenge
Over the years, the integration into the Alpitour Group's offering of the different products and services of the entire tourism supply chain has become a distinctive company brand and, in its approach to digital media, it wanted to maintain references to the dimension of completeness that identifies it. So, in entering the web, the company had to confront all the aspects linked to the integration of its offering. The primary need was to find a consultant with consolidated knowledge of the tourism sector that would be capable of supporting the tour operator not only in the definition of its strategic thinking but also in translating into initiatives in the field with the needs of branding, positioning, sales and loyalty-building coherent with traditional models and distribution channels.
The sophistication of current digital solutions and the progressive diversification and integration of the various disciplines in use (one thinks of the convergence under way between SEO, social media and digital PR), required an approach that would enable a single analysis point across all digital distribution platforms and cross-media competence.
3rdPLACE's constant support is an excellent aid in coding the complexity deriving from the interaction with the increasingly numerous digital channels and tracing the right priorities in such a diversified system,
said Ezio Limonta, Director of the tour operator Jeans and manager of alpitourworld.com.
The solution
The choice of the partner to go with fell to 3rdPLACE, a digital marketing and consulting agency. This organization, which is innovative both in its approach and internal organization and its know-how, was able to meet the Alpitour Group's needs in the strategic consulting and operational delivery phases, centring its activities around project management figures that coordinated their activities in numerous different disciplines, from the definition of the strategy to design, media planning and the development of creativity through to the careful measurement of the actions taken. Specifically, 3rdPLACE sought to create routes focusing on traffic acquisition and conversion to purchase and required an intense integration of this route with other activities to build user loyalty and even more sophisticated use of multiple channels.
After a careful analysis of the offerings on the market, we found 3rdPLACE's integrated and analytical approach to be a real and effective response to our complex needs and ambitions. Certainly there are not many consulting organisations on the Italian scene with these characteristics,
Ezio Limonta added.
The collaboration between the Alpitour Group and 3rdPLACE began in the beginning of 2010, initially for the management of search engine marketing, and was then extended to other strategic areas such as the tactical indexing in search engines, especially in view of the launch of the new release of the site during the summer. Business analytics was intensely used to improve aspects of usability through the interpretation of user navigation patterns but also through testing of the usability of the site with A/B and multi-variant tests on visitor landing pages.
3rdPLACE's support made a significant contribution during the business development phase and allowed the development of the project in two different directions: on the one hand, the continuous integration of the offering, as well as the constant and progressive improvement of the usability of the site based on information from users; on the other, an opening on all the distribution platforms, such as Google Adwords, or in strategic agreements with large-traffic operators such as eDreams, Lastminute, Opodo, Triboo and others. In addition, we are engaged in even more strategic planning that will enable entry on other, still untested channels, such as mobile. The collaboration with 3rdPLACE allows the Group to keep its line of development coherent with criteria of innovation for all digital media.
Results and future developments
Starting from the go-live of the new virtual travel agent, released in the summer, all of Alpitourworld's quantitative and qualitative parameters are growing. For example, we can cite an almost 200% increase in sales on the site, with a simultaneous decrease of the average cost of acquisition of almost 50% and a lowering of the average percentage of exits from the site of over 60%.
The company is currently evaluating all potential solutions for the continuous expansion of the offering.
Thanks to 3rdPLACE, today Alpitourworld.com has made good progress on the road to digitalization, giving a large part of the Group's products availability on the web, while we are still testing many actions that will lead to a further harmonious development of our digital strategies in all its components at an offering, brand and distribution-channel level,
Ezio Limonta concluded.