ORLANDO -- Vacation.com has long been a powerful and valuable URL, but since the late 1990s, it has been dedicated to its eponymous consortium. That changed last week when Travel Leaders Group, which owns both the URL and the consortium, announced that henceforth the URL would point to a new, consumer-facing brand, called simply Vacation.
The primary purpose of Vacation will be to drive highly qualified leads to agents.
The announcement came at the Travel Leaders Network 2017 International Conference here at the Loews Royal Pacific Resort at Universal Orlando, the first conference to bring together the network's associates and affiliates.
Travel Leaders Network was announced last summer and officially launched on Jan. 1, rolling Vacation.com, Travel Leaders Associates and Results Travel into a single organization offering both consortium and franchise solutions to its affiliates and associate members, respectively.
According to John Lovell, president of Travel Leaders Network, Leisure Group and Hotel Division, discussions about how to best leverage the Vacation.com URL were ongoing as the network was being formed.
"We were working behind the scenes to really take an asset that we have -- and that's the Vacation.com URL, the website -- and how we could monetize that," Lovell said.
The new site, dedicated to the Vacation brand, will house content designed to capture consumer attention via online searches for articles, videos and podcasts. The first vertical Vacation section to launch with fully built-out content will be destination weddings and honeymoons. Other verticals will follow. (The site will also have some content outside the destination wedding and honeymoon vertical at its launch.)
Brian Hegarty, vice president of marketing for Travel Leaders Group, said Vacation is designed to capture consumers at the top of the funnel when they are beginning vacation research, unlike the company's lead-generation tool Agent Profiler, which tends to attract customers specifically looking for an agent further down the funnel.
Vacation will be powered by a proprietary perpetual demand generation vehicle. Once consumers have interacted with content (they will be asked to enter their name and email), the technology behind the site will track what they have consumed and how long they have spent with the content, periodically pushing new content to them.
The value an agent brings to travel decisions is part of the website's content.
Melissa Dobmeier, director of demand center operations, said that as visitors interact with the site, each will be assigned a score using a marketing platform. Once they reach a certain score, they are considered a "hot lead" who is ready to work with an agent. A lead-development team will contact consumers and further qualify them, gathering more information, then will connect them with a qualifying agent.
That agent will be given a slew of information about the prospect, including what content they have viewed and how long they have spent with it, as well as answers to any quizzes they have taken on Vacation.
They will also be categorized as self-guided or guided travelers depending on the level of planning they wish to do themselves. All of that helps the agent piece together the kind of travel the consumer is looking for, said Kevin Weisner, senior vice president of leisure and strategy for Travel Leaders Network.
A customer care center will provide additional support to agents, Weisner said, as will a virtual sales assistant, which offers tools like email templates, talking points and follow-up time frames.
Hegarty called the support and training offered to agents a "big differentiator" for Vacation vs. other lead-generation tools such as Travel Leaders Group's Agent Profiler.
While Vacation is launching with a core group of Travel Leaders Network agents for beta testing this month, it is expected to open to the rest of Travel Leaders Group in the fall. To qualify to receive leads, agents have to have expertise, agree to receive and track the progress of leads in the proprietary business tool AgentMate and agree to a revenue-share model in which Travel Leaders Group keeps a percentage of any revenue made. There is no initial cost to participate in the program.
Douglas Quinby, senior vice president of research at Phocuswright, called the use of the Vacation.com URL both "great" and "long overdue." He said Travel Leaders does face challenges with Vacation, however, such as how they will drive people to the site and convert them to agency customers.
"They have an opportunity to create a really powerful, two-sided marketplace with travelers and agents," Quinby said. "We are now seeing successful marketplaces -- Airbnb is the most obvious example -- but the agent-traveler dynamic is more complex. It's how they acquire the right travelers -- not everyone is a travel agent prospect -- and connect those travelers to the right agents, and how they create incentives to drive agent and consumer engagement on the marketplace."
Hegarty said Travel Leaders had done its homework before launching Vacation.
"We spent six months doing research before we really got into the project," he said. "So I think we really understood not just the value of the brand but also the process that we were going through with this perpetual demand generation, to confirm that this was going to be the right direction."
That research came in the form of interviews with agents and customers "to understand the buyer's journey," he said. "That's a big portion of what perpetual demand generation is all about: understanding that buyer's journey, and where their pain points and their delights are in that journey, the highs and the lows. We did a lot of industry research and competitive research to see what else was out there."
According to Travel Leaders, the result of that research was the determination that no one was doing anything similar in travel.
Ninan Chacko, Travel Leaders Group CEO, said marketing has shifted: Buyers are now in control through doing online research, and Vacation addresses that change. High-quality content that educates the buyer is key.
"We really said we want to house this content somewhere that's critical -- a hub that's critical to this buying journey," he said. "And then we want to make sure that we push this content out through Google, through search ads, through social media, but point back at a central hub. And that central hub is this fantastic URL, Vacation.com."