Foundations of Marketing 5th Edition by Ferrell,William Pride

Exercise 17

Click to Get Away with Travelocity
When Travelocity began in 1996, it was one of the first Internet travel websites offering airline and hotel reservations, cruises, vacation packages, and car rentals. Today, Travelocity offers consumers a choice of more than 70,000 hotels, 50 car rental companies, 6,000 travel packages, and flights on dozens of airlines worldwide. Its total travel bookings exceed more than $7 billion annually.
Although it helped pioneer the online travel business, Travelocity faces intense competition from Expedia, Orbitz, and other popular travel websites. That's why its marketers decided several years ago to make the company stand out by standing behind travelers every step of the way. The result is the unique Travelocity Guarantee. First, Travelocity guarantees its low price. If, within 24 hours, consumers find a lower price for travel than the one they booked through Travelocity, the company will refund the difference and add a $50 credit toward future travel. Second, Travelocity allows customers to change passenger names, flight dates, and flight times without paying extra if they make the change within 24 hours of booking their travel. Third, Travelocity pledges to alert customers in advance to any issues that might negatively affect their travel arrangements, such as hotel construction, and work with its trusted partners to fix the problem by switching hotels or making other changes. Fourth, if something goes wrong during a customer's travels, Travelocity will work with its partners to make things right. For example, if a customer books a hotel with a swimming pool but finds that the swimming pool is closed on arrival, Travelocity will, at its own expense, find a comparable or better-quality hotel and move the customer there. Once, the company made a mistake and sold $0 tickets to Fiji and, despite the cost, stood by its guarantee and honored the price. Travelocity maintains a 24-hour hotline open seven days a week to ensure that customers get what they want.
The Travelocity Guarantee allays the concerns of customers who may be worried about booking online. The company has promoted the guarantee with a "Roaming Gnome: Enforcer of the Travelocity Guarantee" advertising campaign. The distinctive Roaming Gnome humanized the brand, embodied the joy of travel, and symbolized seeing the world with new eyes. The advertising campaign created a tremendous buzz about Travelocity and boosted revenues by 37 percent. Based on customer reaction to the campaign, Travelocity opened an online store to sell mugs, magnets, tote bags, and other items featuring the Roaming Gnome, who even has his own page on Facebook.
Over time, Travelocity has acquired a number of travel sites to broaden its offerings. When it purchased Site59, for example, Travelocity solidified its position as a major player in the last-minute travel business. Now customers who feel the urge to travel can get special deals by booking no more than 14 days before they want to leave. The savings are even bigger when customers book a vacation package just a few days in advance. To find out about special deals to favorite destinations, customers simply subscribe to Travelocity's Easy Escapes e-mail newsletter.
Travelocity regularly tests its website for ease of use. It has seven testers clicking all over its website to determine what customers might find confusing and how to make the site faster and more convenient. One lesson Travelocity learned was that customers don't always remember their passwords. To counteract this problem, Travelocity changed the system so that customers could reenter an address or e-mail address and use those details to access their personal profile rather than relying on a password. Thanks to this change, revenues quickly rose by 10 percent. Watch for more changes ahead as Travelocity finds new ways to satisfy its customers and new places for its Gnome to visit.
What are the major situational influences that affect Travelocity customers' buying decisions Explain.