How Away Resorts refreshed their customer strategies through bespoke segmentation

About Away Resorts

Away Resorts is a holiday park operator specialising in holiday homes, luxury lodges, caravans and home lettings and ownership across the UK. Having grown recently from six parks to 27 after a substantial acquisition, the business hypothesised that there may be new customer groups across their wider portfolio of sites. This presented the team with an opportunity to decipher these customers’ demographics and continue to grow the business through engaging and relevant communications.

The challenge

Laura Miller, Head of Marketing at Away Resorts, highlighted three major challenges that Away Resorts needed to overcome to find out what their customers wanted to get out of their holidays and where the optimal locations for the acquisition of future parks would be:

1. Reassess how to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of their marketing spend.
2. Develop a future capital programme that would be backed by a genuine understanding of what customers want from their bookings, their desires when looking for a holiday park, and which amenities to prioritise investing in.
3. Attract the right customer demographic by refreshing existing marketing communications and channels.

The results and benefits

These insights helped Away Resorts gauge where marketing spend should be focused to target specific segments, how best to distribute campaign spending and how to switch strategic gears to deliver more effectively executed campaigns, including the introduction of new media channels.

“It’s never just been about the project; it’s about wanting a deeper understanding of where we felt like we could go a level down to the market to get more owners. We’ve very much looked at our holidaymakers and those who potentially move from some of our key holidaymaker segments into potential holiday homeowners and we’re supporting all kinds of revenue streams within the diversity that makes up a holiday park.”

Hayley Collins, Commercial Systems Manager at Away Resorts

Plus, it has been particularly beneficial during executive board meetings, where tangible, easily comprehensible customer insights can now be shared with the wider business to bolster decision-making.

“Rather than what you might get from one or two surveys and a gut feeling, there’s tangible data that I can go in and explain my reasoning as to why we should choose a specific piece of media for upcoming planning. That’s the bit I’ve never been able to quite do before – giving the certainty and confidence to the executive level that we’re doing the right things.”

Laura Miller, Head of Marketing at Away Resorts

This deep dive into customers has enabled Away Resorts to adapt their customer feedback survey on holiday motivations and needs to be met by including questions on customers’ specific interests. The business has confidently leaned into an ‘exploration’ narrative based on the findings, which suggested that their target segment wants to explore beyond the park—partaking in walks, bike rides and other activities.

The outcomes and the future

In the coming years, Away Resorts is keen to explore larger-scale data-oriented projects with the help of CACI. Additional data acquisition drilling down into more locations along with the possibilities of what can still be done with the business’ existing data to grow and refine their segments remain a priority. Along with the business’ additional data sources, Away Resorts will continue to monitor changes through the segmentation data to enrich and grow their existing data to grow and maintain their core audience.

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