Bookit.nl: at your service with Selligent Interactive Marketing

Bookit.nl: at your service with Selligent Interactive Marketing

Bookit.nl is the leading Dutch provider of short vacations and weekend trips. The company runs a wide range of websites offering all different types of short breaks. Customers can, among others, book a stay in a hotel, on a holiday farm, in a bungalow park or camping and even reserve their minicruise, using different criteria such as location and facilities.

In total, Bookit.nl runs ten websites, each one with a specific focus. The most popular site is Weekendjeweg.nl, the online destination for people seeking to take a weekend break. It has been elected as the best travel website in 2004, 2006, 2007 and 2008 and is followed closely by Bungalows.nl. Although Bookit.nl also has a website for business travellers, leisure and the consumer are what the company is mainly about. The online properties are key in the business model of the company. Manager Joop de Vries: “We have developed all websites internally and have a very hands-on approach in further developing our offering in function of market evolutions and opportunities in the travel and leisure market.”

Optimizing customer experiences and true twoway dialogues

Despite its online business model, Bookit.nl’s main business is not really e-commerce. It’s customer service, experience and loyalty. And that’s where Selligent Interactive Marketing plays a crucial role.

As an online business, Bookit.nl intensively uses e-mail for all activities regarding travel reservations and for newsletters. Besides these e-mail newsletters, the company also combines its e-mail program with various scenarios and other programs including surveys, customer reviews and a loyalty program. A cross-channel and triggered strategy that is fully managed with Selligent Interactive Marketing.

Joop de Vries: “We consider ourselves as a service organisation. Behind all the websites is a dedicated team consisting of several people that assist our customers with travel arrangements, possible problems and having an excellent break. The customer experience is key and when we need to intervene in certain cases we do so, before and during the holiday.”

Mr. de Vries gives an example of a customer that booked in late in a hotel in Switzerland whereby the booking was annulated and his staff intervened to take the necessary arrangements. This dedication to customer service and the customer experience reflects on the availability of the Bookit.nl team but also on the way the company uses Selligent Interactive Marketing to provide the best possible experience. Loyal customers are and must be the result. And this starts when customers visit the site and arrange a short holiday break.

Selligent Interactive Marketing at the service of customer service

To ensure this, Bookit.nl provides various online tools and mechanisms, all powered by Selligent Interactive Marketing:

• When a customer books a trip the data are sent to Selligent Interactive Marketing. Prior to leaving for their trip, customers receive a mail that wishes them a nice stay and provides them with travel tips. The content for these mails is generated by Bookit.nl editors that visit various destinations but also by the customers themselves (user-generated content).
• Customers are invited to share their findings and reviews via surveys, also powered by Selligent Interactive Marketing. They can attribute a certain score to the place where they spent their break. Selligent Interactive Marketing calculates all scores that are then updated on the websites and in the newsletters.
• Bookit.nl has a customer loyalty program, called Weekendsmiles. Customers get Weekendsmiles points each time they book a holiday but also on their birthdays and when participating to the above mentioned surveys. When 15 points are gathered, customers receive a reduction for their next trip. The Weekendsmiles program is a crosschannel one since it is coupled to surveys, online reservations but also to the e-mail marketing program. Customers for instance receive an e-mail on their birthday containing their Weekendsmiles gift and thus bringing Bookit.nl again under their attention, on top of the regular newsletters.
• Since the opinion and experience of Bookit.nl’s customers is so important, the company needs a dashboard that enables it to have a detailed and graphical overview of comments and scores regarding the hotels and other holiday places it offers. This customer reporting system is also fed with Selligent Interactive Marketing data.

Multi-channel operational and service excellence

With an ongoing focus on servicing its customers and improving both experience and loyalty, Bookit.nl is looking at new opportunities to reach new customers and even better serve existing ones. The changes in the online behaviour further enhance this.

Joop de Vries: “These days most people are searching via Google. This results in decreasing brand recognition, a challenge for all businesses and a fact we need to anticipate on. We are testing new possibilities such as mobile media and social media. The latter is among others important for social media monitoring and customer experience.”

It seems Bookit.nl will continue to strengthen what the company is really all about: operational and service excellence by focussing on its customer in an integrated multi-channel and feedback-driven way. The importance of what customers think and need is a key driver in its current and future operations.

Selligent Interactive Marketing makes it possible to combine all these efforts, automatically trigger the necessary customer interactions and return the insights and input from Bookit.nl’s customers.