Liner Notes
Readers looking to set sail to Hawaii, Alaska or the Caribbean should start checking their mail: On Jan. 10, local travel agents will send out 150,000 full-color self-mailers, each customized with a photo of the Norwegian Cruise Lines port nearest the recipient’s home.
If that sounds more sophisticated than what one might expect to receive from a mom-and-pop travel agency, it’s because the engine behind the effort is Vacation.com. The Alexandria, VA firm secures advantageous rates from travel suppliers and printers for agencies in its network, and then sends mailings on behalf of those agencies.
Roughly 800 travel booking firms will be participating in the Norwegian Cruise Lines program. This marks the first time member agencies have been offered variable images on their pieces from Vacation.com.
So-called home-port cruising can be a critical factor affecting whether a traveler makes plans. “When cruise lines surveyed passengers, they found that the highest level of anxiety was over getting to the ship,” said Stephen McGillivray, vice president for marketing at Vacation.com.
The test is a small portion of Vacation.com’s planned activity. In 2005, it will send out 50 250,000-piece traditional mailings plus another 6 million e-mail messages within 30 e-mail campaigns.
Vacation.com houses 5.5 million customer names, from 2,000 of the 7,000 travel agencies that participate in its database program. But the names are never blended into a master file, and the database puts fences around each agency’s file.
What do the 5,000 agencies that don’t sign up for the co-sponsored program get? List hygiene services, for one thing.
Vacation.com offers both name standardization and data appending services. But it does not dedupe names provided by two separate agencies — even within a single campaign. Since each promotion is customized with the travel agency’s name, an otherwise identical piece may generate either an enthusiastic response or indifference based on the sender.
A target that appears twice in a single travel agency’s file — the result, perhaps, of a data entry mistake — would be verified as a duplicate and removed.
The master file is managed by Strategic Software Systems, a data services firm in Richmond, VA. When a company such as Norwegian Cruise Lines comes to Vacation.com with an offer, Strategic Software provides names that match the profile of whichever vacation package is being touted.
The sponsoring vendor — Club Med, Avis, for example — will then pay to mail a certain percentage of these names (with each agency’s contact information on the pieces). It also will offer to partly subsidize mailings to the rest — if every travel agency picks up the remainder of the bill. This allows a small agency to send customized, full-color mailers to its customers for around 45 cents apiece, according to McGillivray.
Currently, the customization is limited to a single panel within the six-panel Norwegian Cruise Lines mailing. But if the test is successful, Vacation.com hopes to use more data in its next round. Bill Hungerford, Strategic Software’s managing partner, anticipates a not-too-distant time in which more of an individual’s demographic and lifestyle information will come into play.
“I know they want to start selecting travelers at the account level,” Hungerford said. “If you’ve got a particular [group of customers] that like to travel during the fall on a specific cruise, they would be selected based on that.”
McGillivray would be happy to customize based on household income, at least initially.
“It’s a matter of whether we want to increase the cost of going with [further customization]. Household income can determine whether we advertise an inside cabin or [one on a balcony].”
