Choosing new destinations

Travel means different things to different people. Some people want to experience beautiful vistas, climb mountains or relax on pristine white sand beaches. Others want to explore a bustling city, eat at five-star restaurants and dance the night away. Travelling may be fun and exciting, but it serves another important purpose. By exposing people to new places, cultures and ways of thinking, travel can help break down barriers and improve understanding among groups of people.

This is one of the ideas that drives Flight Centre Travel Group (FCTG) to help make the world more accessible for millions of traveller worldwide. To accomplish this, the communications team at Flight Centre, the largest brand in the FCTG portfolio, focuses on delivering inspiring travel content to Australian customers across television and cinema, billboards, print, radio, retail shops and all digital channels, including websites, email, mobile and social media.

The Flight Centre blog gets more than 85,000 unique visitors per month where they find travel tips, news and recommendations. Travel Ideas has become one of Australia’s biggest travel magazines and it has no ads—only amazing travel stories. The communications team also creates animations for dynamic digital displays used in 200 Flight Centre retail shops in Australia.

No matter what platform, Flight Centre creates all of its branded communications using Adobe Creative Cloud for enterprise. Working with Adobe Creative Cloud, artists, writers, editors and designers can share images, assets and resources to quickly develop and publish fresh content for customers. Recently, Flight Centre began moving its video production workflow to Team Projects, part of Creative Cloud, which lets editors in Australia work in parallel with their colleagues on-location in other parts of the world.

“Adobe has always been great about working with us to help make our production as efficient as possible,” says Luke Wheatley, Head of Creative and Content at Flight Centre. “If we can deliver the same creative quality, but faster and for less cost, we can put that extra time and money into even more content that inspires our customers to travel.”

Setting the standard for travel video

With video, Flight Centre entered a new age of customer engagement. “We weren’t really doing a lot of video when I started with Flight Centre, but we decided to take a chance and shoot a short piece for our media channels,” says Wheatley. “It became a big hit with more than 3.3 million views. We knew that video was the medium of the future for us.”

Today, Flight Centre produces at least one or two videos every week. The content ranges from spotlights on popular destinations and short clips for social media, to internal videos explaining Flight Centre’s philosophies and uniform standards to employees. For internal communications, video improves the conversion rate on the Flight Centre employee learning portal by 49%.

“Travel can be complicated, especially if people are planning to go somewhere they’ve never been before,” says Wheatley. “Video is one of the best ways to make complicated topics simple. We’re finding that audiences respond very positively to video. Video in an email can increase the click-through-rate by about 96% and the average user spends about 88% more time on a website when we put video on it.”

On top of these regular videos, Flight Centre created its own 13-part travel series made for television. Each 30-minute episode of The 48 Hour Destination takes viewers on a whirlwind tour of the top sights in popular cities and tourist locations around the world. The show is currently in production for its second season with plans to air the series internationally.

“We edit every video with Adobe Premiere Pro,” says Wheatley. “We love how Adobe Creative Cloud allows us to bring ideas to life quickly. Our video team is often working in exotic locales and with Premiere Pro, editors can do some quick cuts on their laptops and upload clips straight to social media to get audiences as excited about our travels as we are.”

Adobe After Effects also plays an important role in almost every video. With After Effects, producers can quickly create animated storyboards that explain their vision to the rest of the team far faster than hasty sketches or paragraphs of text. Artists build upon these storyboards, creating sounds, titles or even colourful animations.

Adobe Creative Cloud services contribute to even greater collaboration with remote teams. Adobe Creative Cloud Libraries allow editors to create a library with all video footage, storyboards, animation and other assets associated with a specific project.

“Adobe Creative Cloud Libraries makes giving feedback very fast and simple, especially when we have people travelling around the world,” says Wheatley. “I can open a library, see everything that’s happening on a project and add my own notes. We’d probably need to cut our video output in half if we didn’t have Creative Cloud Libraries to facilitate collaboration.”

Listening to customer voices

Flight Centre continues to look for new opportunities to reach audiences. Currently, Flight Centre is considering a podcast that will showcase trends and tips for future traveller. Hosts may answer questions or address topics based on information from search data or social media posts.

“Integrated marketing is key to reaching customers with a consistent message on any channel that a customer wants to hear from us,” says Wheatley. “Adobe Creative Cloud gives us all of the tools that we need to create and share branded messages more efficiently so that we can increase our speed and reach without sacrificing quality.”

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