Airplus selects Capital Incentives & Motivation for pan-European incentive scheme

Background
AirPlus is an international business travel solutions company, which was founded in the 1980s in partnership with Lufthansa.  Its UK subsidiary, AirPlus International Ltd, specialises in intelligent solutions for all areas of the business travel process, enabling clients to manage travel efficiently and cost-effectively.

Objectives
Overall, the objective was to develop an easy to manage incentive programme to incentivise and manage the vast travel agency sales channel in the UK.

Specifically, AirPlus International sought a fully outsourced campaign that would:

Enhance the relationship with third party agents

Influence agents to ‘focus, think and book’ AirPlus

Motivate agents to switch corporate custom to AirPlus

Alter corporate travel management and payment habits

Utilise the web to minimise paper and administration

Facilitate effective communication with travel agents

Offer agents aspirational yet achievable rewards

Be fresh, innovative and fully AirPlus branded

Retain the facility to introduce tactical incentives

The target audience was third party travel agents at agencies nationwide, who are typically split by gender and work extensively on linked travel systems and the internet, and international Account Managers, who are predominantly field-based and use the web for convenient communication on the move.

Solution
AirPlus International selected Capital Incentives & Motivation to provide a web-based incentive campaign that would reward travel agents for lead generation. 

It was essential that the reward mechanism increased brand awareness for AirPlus and to achieve this, scratch cards featuring a bespoke design referencing the existing AirPlus Corporate Card were selected.  Fun and simple to use, the interaction required made them an exciting and innovative way to reward.

The scratch cards incorporated varied award offerings of up to £150 Capital Bonds in order to maintain momentum among the participants.  They also enabled tactical incentives to be included to meet specific business needs.

Operation
A dedicated website, accessible via the AirPlus corporate site and consistent with the AirPlus corporate image, was developed and built to manage the lead generation campaign and provide a convenient, paperless mechanism for agent self-registration and client management of the campaign.

To launch the scheme, and at the same time build brand awareness, a themed, branded A5 brochure was issued giving details of the scheme and its benefits, awards and rules.

Agents were able to register their own name, agency and email details and use the unique log-in and password allocated to them to register new or converted leads.  The system then notified the relevant AirPlus account manager via email, so he or she could then approve or decline the lead.  A scratch card was issued to the agent responsible for any approved leads and at any time agents could log-in to check the status of their leads or rewards.

AirPlus chose Capital Bond vouchers to fulfil individual reward needs as they provided an award with a monetary value that is distinct from pay and other benefits. 

In addition, Capital Incentives provided comprehensive management, administration and creative consultancy, which was essential to support the limited internal resources of AirPlus.

Roll-out
The UK programme was so successful that AirPlus decided to roll it out overseas in Spain, Portugal and Italy.  Capital Incentives was easily able to meet this requirement as, since being acquired by the Accor group in 2004 and becoming part of Accentiv’, Accor’s worldwide Relationship Marketing business, the company has the ability to operate international incentive, motivation and customer loyalty campaigns incorporating gift vouchers, merchandise and travel.

The website and launch brochures were translated into the three languages and participants register their leads on the site for approval by the local account manager.  Following this, Capital Incentives exports the information from the websites and then distributes vouchers in each of the three countries.  The participants are awarded Compliments vouchers which have a choice of retail outlets specific to the country.

Results
The lead generation scheme has delivered powerful results and generated substantial business of over £14 million in only eight months, representing a 2900% return on budget.