As holiday sales return, now’s a great time to start thinking about how ancillary products might help your margins. Debbie Ward finds out how scents made sense for one Yorkshire agency.
Like many good agencies, Travel Experience in Huddersfield was used to giving added-value touches, welcoming clients home with a card and some tea bags (Yorkshire, of course) or a gift if it had been a big booking or special occasion holiday.
However when one customer set up Aroma Holiday and started producing scented candles that evoked certain destinations, he suggested they tried them as a new treat. The presents went down well and the agency ended up selling them in the shop.
“If we have a client coming back from a destination Aroma Holiday features we tend to send them a candle instead of flowers or a bottle of wine and customers love them,” explains manager Ruth Littlewood.
The agency then started using the tinned version of the candles as a gift incentive for every booking that customers made in January. When this proved popular, it introduced a display stand to sell the candles in the shop with a few other candles and diffusers in the window and around the room. It restocks once or twice a year.