Travelzoo starts advertising again as demand picks up

The deals publisher’s outdoor campaign intends to inspire Britons to keep dreaming of and planning for holidays to take after lockdown.

The campaign promotes a range of international holidays for 2021, as well as fully refundable UK hotel stays for dates later in the year.

In a recent Travelzoo member survey, 60% said they would book a travel deal right now if it was fully refundable or free to change.

The campaign aims to encourage “booking and saving” now, and then travelling later, by showcasing that it’s working with partners to provide deals with increased flexibility for travel.

The activity, which features no destination-specific imagery, will go live on Friday, initially running for two weeks across digital outdoor sites in major cities including Birmingham, London and Manchester.

Glyn Owen, head of marketing UK, Travelzoo, said: “The travel industry has been severely hit by the pandemic so it’s not time to travel, but it is time to dream and plan for the future.

“We recently returned to publishing travel deals after a break for most of March and April. Our weekly surveys of our member base provided the insight that people were ready to book travel if the offers were refundable or had extra flexibility like ‘no change fees’ for holidays.

“We used this as the basis for this campaign – emphasising the ‘future’ and ‘refundable’ aspects of our offers.”

Phil Rhodes, creative director at creative agency TMW Unlimited, added: “It would have been easy to go down the route of acknowledging the crisis with a ‘holidays can wait’ message, but we wanted to do something that was, while still sensitive to the situation, a little more unexpected and hopeful.

“Given the ultra-short timeframe, we sourced these images from a photographer we’ve worked with before – and they brought the idea to life perfectly.”