APT, Asia Escape Holidays tune up marketing smarts

Tour operator, APT Travel Group, has struck a deal with Datarati to develop and manage its marketing automation strategy.

Under the agreement, Datarati is tasked with migrating the group’s brands, including APT, Travelmarvel, Captain’s Choice and Botanica, across to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The ambition is to deliver customers a more integrated experience from initial selection through to booking and tour experience.

APT content and communications manager, Fiona Corsie, said email was an integral communication channel for the group.

“We are eager to offer a more personalised and streamlined service under the guidance of Datarati,” she said.

The news came as Datarati also confirmed it had been appointed by Perth-based Asia Escape Holidays to also implement Salesforce Marketing, Sales and Service Clouds.

Marketing Cloud will be used to build a customer preferences centre as well as automated payment platform, while the Sales Cloud is about giving the travel company a way of centrally managing sales leads from multiple sources, including third-party reservation booking system, Calypso.

Asia Escape Holiday managing director, Mason Stuart Adams, CRM and centralised customer engagement management has been an immature area of the business historically.

“With the support and strength of Datarati and Salesforce, we hope to become a leader in this area of the travel industry in the future,” he said.

Datarati CEO, Jarther Taylor, said both organisations are leading Australian and global travel companies.

“We look forward to sharing our strategic thinking, marketing expertise and technical capabilities with them to deliver a seamless and enhanced user experience,” he said. “ The business challenge of creating deeper customer engagement through omni-channel journeys is one we relish.”

The latest two deals cap off a year of strong wins for Datarati, including a contract with Virgin Mobile in July to implement and manage marketing automation and CRM. The agreement also sees the consulting group providing ongoing campaign management across the customer lifecycle.

Datarati also secured an Asia-Pacific contract with China-based global tour operator, Nexus Holidays, earlier this year.

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