MEDIA & MARKETING:Three agents will publish 1.5 million catalogues in 2011 despite popularity of online holiday booking

WITH PACKAGE holiday specialists Falcon Holidays, Sunway and Topflight spending well in excess of €500,000 each on advertising and marketing annually, no stone is left unturned in tempting holidaymakers to take the sun.

Television, radio and press advertising, as well as competitions and promotions, are all used to varying degrees. But the bulky brochure is still the main marketing tool, despite the surge in popularity for booking holidays online.

Between them, Falcon, Sunway and Topflight will print almost 1.5 million brochures for their 2011 holiday programmes.

Sunway’s managing director Tanya Airey says the brochure is still her biggest marketing investment, though she is printing fewer of them than in previous years.

“All our brochures are available to download from our website and there aren’t as many travel agents as there used to be,” she says. “Yet despite that, the brochure is a huge part of our business.”

Sunway’s Summer Sun 2011 brochure runs to 230 pages. It’s a big production, with the text for every destination written inhouse and illustrated with photos either supplied by the hotel or the tourist board, or taken by a photographer hired by Sunway.

Airey explains: “The text has to be proofed by each accommodation owner. It’s a massive amount of work and we have to be so careful. If we state that there are 99 steps down to the beach, then we have to be make sure that is correct. Because if there are 100 steps, someone will complain.”

The tour operators distribute the brochures to about 200 travel agents, and post them out when requested. Airey has been trying to cut down on the number of posted brochures due to the cost.

“I ask our reservation staff to find out whether the person requesting a brochure over the phone is seriously interested in going on holiday. We would also direct them to our website, or ask them to call into their local travel agent.”

With all her advertisements, Airey uses different phone numbers so she can track the responses. “The one thing we can’t track is if someone sees or hears our ad, then Googles our website and then calls the number on our site. A huge number of calls come from our website, but the problem is we don’t know how that person got to our website. Sunway has to become a household name, and advertising creates that brand awareness.”

Airey doesn’t spend a lot of money on ad production. Radio and press ads are produced inhouse, but she gets TV3 or RTÉ to produce her commercials when placing TV ads with them.

Falcon Holidays will print 450,000 brochures this year, split between two Falcon sun holiday brochures published in August and December, and a brochure for the Thomson Holidays division launched by Falcon last autumn.

Falcon’s marketing manager Charlotte Brenner says a huge portion of the brochure work is checking the accommodations and the resorts to update the text from the previous year’s brochure, as well as writing new text and sourcing new images for new holidays in the brochure.

Brenner says: “I remember brochures from years back, with just an image of the accommodation and a mood image to set the scene. Now all our brochures have exterior and interior shots and photos of the facilities on offer.”

Falcon recently concluded a promotion with the Sunday World and RTÉ 2FM which saw a free holiday given away every day for a month. “We have moved away from TV advertising to concentrate more on radio and press,” says Brenner. “We find those media give our campaign much more longevity. With Falcon we are very much targeting families and housewives.”

Tony Collins, managing director of Topflight, expects about 400,000 package holidays will be sold by the tour operators this year – half of those sold at the height of the boom.

Topflight offers packages, ranging from summer sun to ski. Collins says the annual print run for Topflight brochures is 500,000, supplemented by advertising and an annual media tie-in with Ian Dempsey’s breakfast show on Today FM. This year more than 400 ski enthusiasts bought a Topflight package to join Dempsey on the slopes.

“The Today FM week is an expensive promotion to run. This year we flew in three bands to Austria, including The Sawdoctors, to entertain the skiers,” says Collins.

Opinions are mixed about prospects for 2011. Airey says the first two weeks of January were up on last year, but business slowed in the second half of the month. Falcon’s Brenner says bookings in January were ahead of 2010, while Collins of Topflight remains cautious. “Value is the determining factor for would-be holidaymakers,” he says.