By Will Novosedlik

Last week, Air Transat unveiled its latest brand campaign, built around the tagline “Travel Moves Us.” It’s a double entendre that takes us beyond the utilitarian notion of conveyance to the more meaningful realm of experience and enrichment.

As noted in our coverage of the campaign launch, CD Brian Gill of Sid Lee, Transat’s AOR, explains “It’s about the joys of travel, including the challenges it poses – challenges that ultimately make travel one of the most rewarding experiences of all.”

Marketing has the ability to solve problems, and we wanted to know what solutions Air Transat’s new campaign was cooking up.

So we asked Xavier Szwengler, VP marketing and International Markets for Air Transat, what the problem was. Says Szwengler, “I wouldn’t call it a problem, I’d call it an opportunity for us to tell a deeper, more emotional story about the potential for travel to open us up to new experiences.”

You don’t need to dive too deeply to determine the business issues that ignite that sentiment. In the summer, as pandemic restrictions eased, demand for travel exploded. In response, Air Transat restarted flights to a total of 25 European destinations. At peak, the carrier operated 50 direct flights weekly on 69 direct routes.

While airlines around the world dusted off their fleets to cope with the surge in demand, Air Transat had another challenge: to change people’s perceptions of it as a vacation-focused “leisure” carrier. Traditionally, the brand has been associated with holiday flights to the Caribbean and Europe. To get the business up to pre-pandemic volumes and beyond, the brand needed to change that.

According to Szwengler, the campaign is aimed at four customer segments: people who fly to visit friends and relatives, solo travellers, families and experience seekers. While the campaign touches on all four, the messaging is tilted towards the latter two. That’s where the growth opportunity lies.

It’s not dissimilar to the Viking River Cruise’s “Be Curious” campaign which promotes the idea that time is precious, so why not use it to travel to places you haven’t yet seen? It evokes the same idea of opening up to the wider world of experience and the transformative power of travel. The difference with Transat’s “Travel Moves Us” is that it is much more emotional, more diverse, more egalitarian and less about wealthy travellers cruising the Danube while sampling haute cuisine and fine wine.

To inform the repositioning, Szwengler and his team conducted a combination of qualitative and quantitative research. Quantitatively, they have been running a satisfaction survey every day since 2018, and they also regularly track their Net Promoter Score. Ipsos was engaged for a quantitative brand study and Ad Hoc for qualitative. Sid Lee and Element 54 worked on market analysis.

Customer insight is playing a big role in Transat’s repositioning as it pivots towards customer-centricity. Szwengler created the role of Senior Director, Brand and Customer Experience, now held by Maria Pagano, as part of that pivot.

Says Szwengler, “While we have won the Skytrax award for North America’s Best Leisure Airline twice and World’s Best Leisure Airline four times since 2017, we need to make sure that what we say matches what we do. We are just as committed to getting the experience right as we are to getting the messaging right.”

Szwengler also points to the brand’s 35-year history as a source of authenticity. “We must present ourselves as who we are. We’re not “teenagers” anymore. We are a mature brand with a proven track record of excellence. It’s time to build on that.”