We were never out of the Media
The PR team kept our collection featured in a huge list of publications covering both European and UK travel, from The Times’ 50 Great Breaks in France to individual place features in The Guardian and Red Magazine and many more. Our Pubs Awards alone secured 37 pieces of regional coverage and were a major feature in The Telegraph, taking centre stage in their weekend supplement, The Saturday.
Our campaigns really hit the spot
In response to travel restrictions, we created Sawday’s At Home, in which we kept you front of mind by giving people inspiration for the destinations they were missing. We created numerous collections and targeted marketing to focus on availability where travel was permissible and ran our Holidays for Good scheme to give breaks to NHS staff. This received over 8,000 nominations and lead to heartwarming moments like rewarding a nurse with some quality time with her 7-year old son, from whom she’d had to isolate from during the pandemic.
Our emails continued to perform above industry average
Our average open rate for emails over the whole of 2020 was over double the industry average, as was the click through rate, which is a clear indicator that our 170,000 subscribers were really engaged with our campaigns, keen to see our amazing places and get back to you as soon as possible.
Our website traffic stayed strong
Even with a pandemic affecting travel, our web visits over the last 12 months are up 10% on the previous year, despite guests being unable to travel to our European destinations. Users are also more engaged, spending longer on site, viewing more pages and showing a lower bounce rate. (For those not familiar with website analytics, a bounce rate is nothing to do with trampolines, it’s when someone leaves the page they arrived on without engaging with any content on the site.) All this means more bang for your buck in terms of getting seen by guests.
We’ve made great plans for 2021
Next year, we’re continuing with the development of our website despite the strong 2020 stats, introducing the potential for guests to search by date and changing our enquiry system to put you directly in touch with guests without us as an intermediary. These changes will combine with our expert marketing and PR to make 2021 a better year and bring more of the right guests through our site to your beds.