Face to face: Chris Roach, Travel 35
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Why did you decide to establish While We Are Young?
I established While We Are young as a way to break the current mold of youth trips and experiences. When I was 18, a group of friends and I travelled to Barbados for carnival and we had, arguably, one of the greatest trips of all time. We were in night clubs with Rihanna, we had some of the most incredible seafood and the best part was, it was all really cheap. A few years went by and all my close friends all started to go to Bali, Thailand, Laos, all the ‘typical’ student destinations. I asked them why and they simply said ‘because it’s so cheap’. My mind flashed back to our first trip to Barbados and right then, I knew what I wanted to try and do. After a roller coaster of non-stop travelling, our team has put together affordable packages to luxury destinations such as Barbados, South Africa and Dubai for the younger traveler. We like to think we are a little more luxury, a little less backpacker.
What makes you different to other youth-orientated tour operators?
As I was explaining earlier, the youth market is primarily targeted to destinations in South-East Asia, you tend to see a lot of new and upcoming youth-orientated tour operators start over there, but we wanted to be different. We wanted to be known as the guys who started taking students and young professionals to somewhere different, somewhere new, somewhere really off the beaten-track. It’s such a competitive market! We’re competing with companies who have been around for 50+ years, but we still have managed to enter luxury markets and negotiate prices to make our trips affordable to our travelers. No other youth-operators have trips to Barbados or trips to Dubai & Oman and this is something we’re proud of. We’re also different than other tour operators because we include all our activities (We call them memories) in the price of the trip and it’s not just 3 or 4, some of our trips have 16+ included activities. When our customers see that our trips are only 8 to 10 days long and they see that many activities included, they really start to get excited.
The youth tourism market is worth over $200 Billion annually and with younger people now more likely to go abroad than their parents, the market can only get bigger. We’re seeing flights becoming cheaper, so even on a budget, young people can travel the world and experience it in its natural beauty. I don’t look at While We Are Young as a niche company in the youth market because they’re thousands of young professionals and students, who still want to see other parts of the world, which are currently are not being targeted by all the big players in this sector. The world is a huge place, yet we seem to only travel to such a small percentage of it. It’s our jobs as tour operators to introduce new destinations and new cultures to our customers.
What’s your marketing strategy and what role does technology and social media play given the tech-savvy market you are targeting?
Since we are relatively new to the youth market, our marketing campaigns and strategies have been based around getting young people to recognise the ‘While We Are Young’ brand. We have worked with a number of youth brands and bloggers in order to show what sort of people we are and also to show people first hand, how awesome our tours really are! I think trust plays such an important role in the travel industry and our main priority at the moment is to get people to trust us.
Social media has played such an important role in branding While We Are Young. It has given us so much insight into our customers and the sort of people who follow us. In the last few months, we have surpassed 9000+ fans on Facebook and over 1000 on Instagram. Social media has been such a great way to reach a huge amount of people for the fraction of the price of traditional advertising. It’s the ability to control your marketing from a mobile, which is what makes me happiest. I can be across the world and still be making status updates, adding tours and uploading photos. I’m always very connected with our customers because of this. If I took out a newspaper advert, it’s pretty hard to gain detailed insights into who has looked at my advert. On Facebook, we have the ability to see how popular an advert is, how many people have visited our site as a direct cause of the advert and to see who what people don’t like about it through the comments section.
What’s selling well and why?
All our tours are selling well, but by far the most popular has been our ‘Discover South Africa’ package. The reason we believe it is selling so well is because of the amount of life-changing memories we have included. Our customers experience everything from bungee jumping to safari’s to riding an ostrich. This trip took months of planning and the results have really shown. People are definitely looking for the complete package and that is something we offer. Our guests don’t have to worry about booking any extra activities within South Africa because we have it all covered under one price.
Do you work with agents and if so, what incentives and training do you offer?
We would love to work with agents who would be passionate about selling to younger clients. It seems that everyone underestimates how amazing agents are in a world overrun with technology. For agents, who are looking to work with us, our tours defiantly offer a chance to gain some newer clients if they should ever come into store. We offer our agents a very generous commission package, as well as free trips for our highest sellers. Our staff are always on hand to come down to have training sessions with our various agents. Any agents who are interested, please do get in touch.
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