Expedia.ca has introduced the Expedia+ loyalty rewards program to Canada, making it the first market outside the U.S. where Expedia travellers can earn points towards bookings and flights.
Sean Shannon, managing director of Expedia.ca, said the program is intended to help Expedia win a greater share of Canadians’ travel bookings, and to encourage them to book more of their on-vacation activities through Expedia.
The program was soft-launched with email communications in November, and officially introduced this week with a TV and online campaign.
Travellers receive points for dollars they spend on flights, hotel bookings, packages, activities and rentals. They also get access to exclusive member offers.
Booking via the Expedia mobile app yields triple points, which Shannon said was to encourage them to form a habit of using their mobile app both while they’re planning for vacations and looking for things to do when they get there.
“Getting people to download is a good start, but what you really want them to do use their apps,” he said. “We’re trying to see how far we can move that needle.”
He said the program is designed to avoid conflict with other travel rewards programs like Aeroplan. If travellers want to book their Expedia getaway with a preferred airline to get air miles, using a credit card with its own loyalty rewards system, they can collect all three rewards points simultaneously.
“We’re calling it triple-dipping,” Shannon said. “There’s not a choice there. We’re not saying we want you to give up this and take that.”
The Canadian rollout was contingent on a survey of 1,000 Canadians that Northstar Research performed to determine whether Canadians were already saturated with travel rewards programs. Turns out we’re far from it — even though 69% of consumers polled said they were already part of a loyalty program, 68% said they’d like to join a new one.
The survey respondents were generally enthusiastic about travel rewards: of those who have received travel rewards in the past, 87% agreed they added true value, and 40% of Canadians said they rely on rewards to make vacation plans possible in the first place.
Grip developed creative for the campaign, Veritas managed public relations and Mediacom handled the media buy.
