Create a future-fit strategy to engage Next Generation timeshare buyers online, generate leads and help drive conversion
Next Gen time share buyers want to be empowered to do their own research online and expect greater transparency, content and tools
A digitally aided buyer journey rooted in customer insights, with a newly defined role and experience prototypes for the website
Business discovery
Category audit
Audience profiling
Audience discovery
Journey map
Vision for digital
Experience principles
Ideation workshop
Design sprint
Experience map
Holiday Inn Club Vacations was under pressure to rethink its buying experience. Competitors from Disney to Hyatt were fast upgrading their online journeys to engage Next Gen buyers, who were younger and more diverse – and expected a friendlier and a more helpful customer experience.
Holiday Inn Club Vacations, a timeshare brand and business owned by IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group), a FTSE100 company, was a client of Iris Atlanta. Iris had landed on an opportunity to help review and rethink the brand's customer experience, with a focus on the prospect journey in particular.
I got involved from the very beginnings of this project, helping to put shape to the way we approached it with a customer-centric mindset.
As the project kicked off, I was flown into Atlanta to meet the clients at the IHG HQ and to help get under the skin of the business. First up, I started building a picture of the audience, the way the existing buyer experience worked and how IHG did its prospecting.
The current approach to the journey was pre-dominantly an outbound call model that targeted existing IHG customers. Selected IHG customers were tempted with an offer of a mini vacation for the family at their chosen resort.
The catch was that as part of your mini vacation you had to attend the timeshare tour – effectively a sales pitch. They were given a 12-month window in which to go on their mini vacations.
Bluntly put, the whole approach was based on shovelling a bunch of uninformed prospects into the buying journey, giving them all information at once while on site – and then putting people under pressure to sign on the dotted line with a limited time offer that expired the moment you got off your chair.
It was hardly appetising.
The whole thing was operating with old school sales tactics, but it was a tried and tested model that had delivered for nearly a half a century. But the world had moved on, and Holiday Inn Club Vacations knew it had to change the game and provide a more customer-centric buying journey. Our job was to show exactly how.
“Holiday Inn Club Vacations knew it had to change the
game and provide a more customer-centric buying journey. Our job was to show exactly how.”
Working with a fellow business analyst, we sized up the market and got under the skin of IHG’s business data. We soon realised there were some more pain points to fix.
IHG’s own data told us that a whopping 38% of people who took up the mini vacation offer never actually ended up going – even though this meant they lost their own money. We had to dig deeper to understand why.
This called for a better profiling of the Next Gen audience. We aggregated data from primary and third-party sources, to help us build a picture of the audience and their behaviours.
“38% of people who took up the mini vacation offer never actually ended up going. We had to understand why.”
We then carried out a set of in-depth interviews to understand what the audience thought and felt about the existing buying experience and how they went about researching, planning, and booking their holidays in general.
Our rapid audience discovery helped identify a range of key pain points along the journey.
The lack of information, content and tools online unsurprisingly frustrated people and made it feel like the business had something to hide. The lack of any digital experience in helping people to decide where they wanted to go, and to organise things like flights, resulted in many simply giving up.
“An average hotel booker visits 12 travel sites before booking online; 54% of consumers prefer to visit multiple travel sites 30 days prior to booking.”
Ideation session in Orlando, Florida.
There were other pain points deeper down the journey too. People who turned up at the mini vacation thought they would get to stay at the actual resort, but at times would find themselves staying in another IHG hotel near-by. Just coming in for the timeshare sales tour at the Holiday Club Vacation resort was not something they thought they had signed up to.
The lack of well-designed and clear online content and customer journey didn’t help people understand what they were always signing up to and what they could expect. Information was easily missed in a pure-play voice journey.
Experience design sprint, Atlanta
Like in so many other categories, digital has created a whole new set of expectations on how brands need to cater for them. It was clear that the Next Gen audience expected brands like Holiday Inn Club Vacations to engage then in a more transparent and helpful manner.
We needed a digital experience that put Next Gen buyers in control of the experience and what they were getting every step of the way. We needed to educate people about what to expect from their mini-vacations, offering them help for booking, and then bringing to life what the timeshare ownership experience would be like – and the financials involved.
To help us achieve this, we defined a new set of experience principles that gave more power to the customer and repositioning the role of digital to be offering on-demand help and expertise through the journey.
We borrowed principles from leading hotel brands, including other IHG brands in its roster, and started ideating how we could bring to life the Holiday Club Vacation resorts, the mini vacation booking, and time share education process to life in a more modern way.
Throughout the process we worked in a collaborative way with our client. We facilitated an ideation session in Orlando with a broad range of key stakeholders from IHG Holiday Club Vacation and partners. This was followed by an experience design sprint with a smaller team in Atlanta to define what it all meant for the website experience.
The work enabled Holiday Inn Club Vacations to develop a friendlier buying journey while also informing the re-design of the Holiday Club Vacations website, helping to usher the brand into a new customer-centric era.
“The work inspired a friendlier Next Gen buying journey and the redesign of the new website helping to usher the brand into a new customer-centric era.”
Reviewing inputs from a client workshop in Atlanta
“Even the biggest skeptics were engaged, and the fact that they all stayed more than thirty mins past the end time, with no urgency to leave, is a clear sign that our message was resonating. That, in and of itself, was a win.”
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