The activity was set up as a traditional Christmas Calendar with 24 doors to open – one for each day in December up until Christmas. Behind every door was a Dubai- related question about Dubai as a destination, experiences in Dubai, exciting restaurants, new hotels, and naturally some information about the COVID situation.
To create an incentive for the travel agents to participate, we collected FOC prizes from some of our partners in Dubai – for example, we got plane tickets from Emirates, experiences from Orient Tours and hotel stays at among others Atlantis the Palm, Rove hotels, and Hilton Hotels. The main prize was a trip to Dubai including plane tickets, transfer from the airport to the hotel, a hotel stay at Rove La Mer Beach and a Dubai City Tour with Orient Tours.
To encourage agents to sign up for the calendar and to keep the agents engaged throughout December, we made an email campaign for our extensive database of travel agents. Here, agents got information about the calendar, the prizes and how to participate together with a link to sign up for daily reminders.
The activity also included advertising to reach more and new travel agents beyond our existing database. Banner ads were placed in top travel trade media. Here, almost 500,000 people with a connection to the Nordic travel industry were exposed to the advertisements.
The training activity received a lot of positive feedback from travel agents, who thought the activity was a fun and joyful way to get new knowledge on the destination, and in total, the calendar was a great success. A total of 961 agents participated in the activity, a 240% achievement of our KPI. On average, the agents participated 8 times, which we find to be a very satisfying result – especially considering the current situation with many agents being furloughed or working only part time.
