The rebrand features a revamped logo and singular visual identity, a new vision and mission statement, and is tied together by six new brand values, which commit Advantage to operating as a people-first outfit, with excellence, commercial success and "having fun" at the centre of its mission.

Advantage said the investment was "sizeable" and would be delivered in phases. The new website, meanwhile, will in time allow consumers to carry out more nuanced searches for members, with Advantage targeting a three-fold increase in searches over the coming year.

Chief executive Julia Lo Bue-Said described the new site as Advantage’s "digital shop window", one designed to drive growth through member recruitment and increase consumer awareness of members.

Revealed at its 2025 conference in Malta, the consortium will begin rolling out the new brand on Wednesday (14 May), which will see Advantage drastically consolidate the branding across more than 30 elements and divisions of the business, some of which are decades old.

Advantage’s popular managed services (AMS) proposition will be one to lose its existing identity, although marketing director David Forder stressed the division would remain one of the consortium’s "fundamental" operating models.

Lo Bue-Said added: "The question is – how do we leverage our brands? When you’ve got 30 brands, or even just five, six, seven key brands, it became really, really difficult to do that."

Forder said there would be subtle differences to the new branding for leisure and business travel members, delineated through colour, adding it was difficult for those businesses spanning both disciplines to use Advantage’s current branding "in a harmonious way".

Pressed on whether members would be forced to rebrand, Forder said feedback from members suggested they were ready to embrace a new look providing it was contemporary and sympathetically designed. "We absolutely will be advocating they get behind this," he said.

The rollout will start with digital assets. Forder and Lo Bue-Said said no decision had yet been made on the extent to which the cost of rebranding would fall on members, pending an audit of how the current Advantage branding is being used. "Once we’ve done the audit, we’ll review and take a decision as to what that needs to be," said Lo Bue-Said.

Forder added he hoped the new look would encourage more members to utilise the brand as Advantage pushes for greater recognition beyond the confines of the industry, a process accelerated over the past five years through the profile it built during the pandemic and the subsequent launch of the Advantage-led UK Outbound Travel lobby group.

Lo Bue-Said said the consortium’s new strapline, "We’re here for your journey", underlined its dedication both to members and their clients. "We’ve embarked on a transformative journey of our own," she said.

Advantage, said Lo Bue-Said, had "methodically crafted" a strategy for the years ahead, and admitted the organisation’s growth had "outpaced its visual representation". "Our members’ success story deserves to be told through a brand that captures the energy, innovation and ambition that defines us," she continued.

"The time has come to create a more contemporary face for our business — one that authentically represents not just who we are today but boldly signals our aspirations for tomorrow."

Specialisation focus

Advantage’s aim is to position itself as a one-stop shop for all potential membership needs, from managed services and commercial partnerships to marketing support and networking opportunities, plus the offer of insurance, bonding services and the necessary technology to operate.

Central to this will be the launch of a new digital platform, which Advantage said has been designed to seamlessly connect consumers with members. "The site features an intuitive member search facility enabling consumers to easily locate their nearest travel agent," it said.

In addition, the platform introduces a "news and resources" hub making available to agents thought leadership content "that reinforces Advantage’s position as an industry authority with wide-ranging expertise across the travel sector".

Forder confirmed the Advantage website had been rebuilt from the ground up with members and consumers in mind, and would not only make the member search tools better, but also bring them to the fore and make them "more obvious".

He admitted the agent search function and user experience on the old site "wasn’t great" and would be dramatically improved to help users find leisure agencies, chiefly by location, and corporate travel providers "by specialisation".

He confirmed further phases of development would bring more improvements to the leisure agency search, giving consumers the ability to search by product specialisation. "That is definitely in phase two," he added.

‘Sizeable investment’

Advantage is aiming to increase the number of agent searches on the site by 300% in the year following the launch. Forder said the current site’s limitations had prevented Advantage from taking action earlier.

The rebrand, he continued, has taken into account feedback from stakeholders, which revealed the need to streamline Advantage’s identity, reduce complexities and better articulate its proposition to both members and prospective members, as well as consumers.

"Until now, we’ve operated with multiple brands and visual identities, creating potential confusion in the marketplace," said Forder. "Our refreshed identity simplifies our positioning, centred around a single-stop solution."

Forder said empowering members and stakeholders to adopt Advantage’s new branding alongside their own, and helping them retro-fit the new brand through the launch of new guidelines, would be a key focus, albeit while acknowledging members’ own branding would "naturally take precedence".

He added "trust" had been a consideration throughout, and was a "fundamental quality" members associate with the consortium, while stressing the new look and feel had been "designed to engage customers more effectively than ever before".

The new logo, said Forder, spells out the consortium’s initials – ATP – and partially retains a triangle motif from the existing Advantage logo, which he characterised as "a nod to Advantage’s heritage". Forder said that while Advantage would not seek to become known as ATP, there was "a long-term plan" to build recognition of the new logo.

The choice of dark green, he added, was both contemporary and something that would set the branding apart from Advantage’s competitors.

Lo Bue-Said declined to comment on how much Advantage had spent on the rebrand, other than it being "a sizeable investment". "It will continue and it will evolve," she said. "It’s part of a much bigger project. This is really about our strategic framework for the future, which touches so many different areas of the business. So the investment is sizeable in lots of different ways."

On Advantage’s decision to bring its vision, mission and brand values to the fore, Lo Bue-Said said the deeper the consortium got into the rebranding exercise, the more facets came into the equation. "We’ve always had a vision, we’ve always had values, but as we started this project it was clear we hadn’t evolved them. The organisation and our strategic direction has moved at a faster pace than our values and brand.

"It gave us the opportunity to think about what and where we want to be. And this was an opportunity to really bring that to life."