Travel, leisure & hospitality
Head of marketing and commercial, women's football
The Football Association
Marzena Bogdanowicz has ensured The Football Association (FA) squeezes maximum commercial value and public profile out of England’s Women’s Euros win in 2022, with a remit to attract both sponsors and participants into women’s football.
Over 17 million TV spectators watched the Lionesses win the Wembley final last July, while the 2022/23 Women’s Super League season saw records set for attendance, viewership and commercial partnerships. Over 5,600 now attend each game on average in the FA’s top domestic league (sponsored by Barclays in a deal worth £30m over three years), well on the way to a target of 6,000 by 2024. The 2023 Vitality Women’s FA Cup final was a sellout, doubling the previous year’s attendance.
Brands’ sky-high interest in the Lionesses continued this summer with the Women’s World Cup. The FA has 17 partners for women’s football, up from six in 2017. When accounting software brand Xero partnered with the FA last September, marketing director John Coldicutt called it a “ridiculously obvious” investment.
Bogdanowicz’s career history evidences a dedicated and passionate sports marketer, with previous roles promoting the British or English governing bodies for squash, cricket, volleyball and gymnastics. Her big break was creating the Team GB brand for the British Olympic Association in 1999 – an Olympic legacy that continues to last.■
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Bogdanowicz
Group chief customer officer
Travelopia
Priding herself on being a customer-centric executive board leader, Sally Cowdry joined Travelopia as group chief customer officer and managing director of its Tailormade and Education divisions in June 2018. She already had a wealth of marketing experience at that time, including five years at Camelot and over a decade at O2. Cowdry has also been a board member of The Marketing Academy for the past 12 years.
Travelopia currently has 26 specialist travel brands in its portfolio, from polar exploration brand Quark Expeditions to all-inclusive private jet operator TCS World Travel. The pandemic was therefore a challenging time for the business, but last year it showed early signs of a strong recovery. The number of passengers travelling with the group more than doubled in the year ending September 2022, reaching 190,000. Profitability returned with an adjusted EBITDA of £26.8m, as revenue soared from £203m to £459m.
With Cowdry at the helm, delivering excellent customer experiences is a core focus for the company. Feedback is acquired throughout the customer journey, resulting in high satisfaction and loyalty scores across the group’s portfolio.■
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CMO
Booking.com
After a decade at Google, Arjan Dijk joined Booking.com in 2019 to oversee its worldwide marketing efforts. A brand which has shown its commitment to consistency, Booking.com continues to launch campaigns under its ‘Booking.yeah’ platform, which first launched in 2013. The latest star-studded iterations have featured actor Idris Elba and actress Melissa McCarthy, highlighting Booking.com’s flight and rental car offerings for the first time, as well as accommodation.
Sponsorships have also been key for the brand over the past 18 months. It kicked off a multi-year partnership with UEFA for the Women’s Euros last year and continued its tie-up with Eurovision Song Contest.
Under his watch the brand has moved away from what he sees as an artificial divide between performance and brand marketing, with Dijk instead preferring to split Booking.com’s marketing into low, medium and high intensity activity.
Dijk’s marketing efforts have helped to deliver a strong post-Covid recovery. Globally, nearly 900 million room nights were booked on the platform in 2022 – an all-time high. Revenue also hit a new record, up 13% on 2019 to more than $17bn. That momentum continued into Q1 2023, with room nights reaching a quarterly high of 274 million.■
Arjan
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Sara
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Hamish
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Michelle
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Tamara
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Andrew
Watson
Chief customer and marketing officer
EasyJet
Last year EasyJet heralded a “new era” for the company, marked by the launch of its first pan-European campaign since the pandemic, alongside new brand platform ‘NextGen EasyJet’.
Leading the marketing agenda is Robert Birge, who since joining the airline in August 2022 has overseen a 51% increase in sales and marketing spend, reaching £103m during the first half of 2023.
The company claims to have delivered 60% year-on-year customer growth for its holiday business. Marketing spend focused on holidaymakers travelling through Gatwick, with the airline looking to make “targeted investments” to strengthen its customer base. EasyJet now expects its holiday division to deliver a pre-tax profit of £80m in 2023.
This year has also seen the brand embark on a variety of activations, including a tie-up with TV presenter Scarlette Douglas offering sun-starved Brits a self-assembly ‘home beach’ kit. On a larger scale, EasyJet inked a partnership with the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest in Liverpool. Described by Birge as the “perfect match”, the airline flew thousands of visitors to the city for the competition.■
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Birge
Zoe
Harris
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CMO
On the Beach
On the Beach is adamant its “truly differentiated” customer proposition has helped drive a year of “strategic progress” for the business. Fundamental to this growth is the success of ‘The most wonderful time of the year’, the travel operator’s largest offline marketing investment to date.
Masterminded by Zoe Harris, On the Beach claims the campaign has increased the volume of bookings and average value of holidays sold, delivering a 56% improvement in spontaneous awareness, 11% rise in consideration and 115% uplift in ad awareness.
Under Harris’s watch the business has deepened its commitment to marketing. Offline marketing spend during the first half of 2023 rose 61% to £13.4m versus 2022 levels, matched by a £12.5m investment in online marketing. The company plans to continue investing in its brand proposition, which it says is encouraging more customers to search for five-star hotels.
On the Beach is reaping the rewards of its marketing push. Group gross profit – once marketing spend is deducted – hit £24.2m during the first half of 2023, up 29% on last year.■
Group marketing director (UK & Europe)
Merlin Entertainment
Sara Holt has been promoted at Merlin Entertainment twice this year, expanding her remit to oversee all divisions and operating groups in the UK and the resort theme parks business in Europe. She now manages a team of 150 and has a £30m marketing budget, with accountability for a £700m P&L.
It’s been a busy 2023 for Merlin. In March, the team went live with a horror-themed TV campaign promoting new Alton Towers ride, The Curse at Alton Manor. Introducing creepy character Emily, the campaign spanned social media, bus wraps, a UV mural and doll’s house pop-up.
Elsewhere fellow Merlin resort Legoland produced April’s most effective TV ad, according to Marketing Week and Kantar’s ‘The Works’ study.
Focusing on the brand’s distinctive assets, the study found the advert delivers “uniqueness” in the top 100 percentile of all UK ads. From a brand perspective the Legoland campaign scored in the top 3% of UK adverts, as well as scoring in the top 2% for long-term impact and top 8% for short-term returns.■
Director of marketing
British Airways
From unveiling its first new cabin crew uniform for two decades, to posting quarterly profit for the first time since 2019, British Airways is gearing up for growth.
With this in mind, marketing boss Hamish McVey teamed up with agency Uncommon on the launch of ‘A British Original’. Exploring the different reasons why people travel, the campaign kicked off in October 2022 across 500 print, digital and outdoor executions.
Then in April the airline recruited famous faces such as chef Tom Kerridge and entrepreneur Steven Bartlett to put a fresh twist on the traditional safety video. Featuring onboard long-haul flights, the video is backed by a wider customer experience focus, including a dedicated British Original menu and in-flight entertainment channel.
Under McVey’s watch, British Airways has branched out into live experiences through a tie-up with British Summer Time festival. Described by the marketing boss as a “natural fit” with the British Original message, British Airway’s stage offered festivalgoers a 360-degree photo opportunity, transporting them to the destination of their choice.■
Marketing and brand director
UK & Ireland, Paddy Power Betfair
Given Paddy Power’s cheeky tone of voice and penchant for attention-grabbing stunts, it would be easy to write off its marketing organisation as a one-trick pony. But, while Michelle Spillane is not shy about continuing the irreverent brand heritage, she has shown herself to be very serious about effective marketing.
She credits Paddy Power Betfair’s business intelligence setup as the best she has worked with, and her team uses its econometric modelling to make key media-buying decisions. This pairs with Paddy Power’s new creative from BBH London – a relationship started in January – which bears a razor-sharp edge alongside typical humour and cultural relevance. The first example was an ad featuring former England footballer Peter Crouch and Irish actor Colm Meaney, centring on the rivalry between the nations’ racing fans at the Cheltenham Festival. “Our work needed an evolved point of view” after “the world had changed” during Covid, Spillane told Marketing Week.
A decision to maintain share of voice through advertising and original content during Covid, when many sports were suspended, most likely helped Paddy Power Betfair’s recovery from the pandemic in the UK and Ireland market Spillane looks after. Retail revenue was up 15% along with market share, according to owner Flutter Entertainment’s Q1 report. Overall revenue rose 17% and average monthly players by 11% year on year in the period.■
Global customer director
Premier Inn
Tamara Strauss already had two decades of marketing experience in the travel and hospitality sector when she joined Premier Inn in 2019. Two years later she oversaw the launch of its brand platform ‘Rest Easy’, which saw Sir Lenny Henry return as the voice of the brand.
The second campaign under the platform launched last October. Moving the platform on from its post-Covid message of reassurance, ‘Same Feeling, Whatever the Trip’ focused on the theme of reliability amid the uncertainty of the cost of living crisis.
According to parent company Whitbread, the platform has been a huge success. As the firm boasted a 556% leap in profits to £492m in 2022, CEO Dominic Paul hailed Premier Inn’s brand marketing as a “powerful tool” in driving bookings and reducing the cost of customer acquisition. The hotel chain’s “highly effective marketing" helped to drive the volume of customers visiting its website from 4.2 million in 2018 to 5.9 million last year.
Premier Inn’s brand health is also strong, ranking top of its category on satisfaction, impression, value and awareness according to YouGov’s BrandIndex.■
Vice-president of marketing, brand & digital EMEA
Marriott International
With a focus on developing customer-centric and data-led marketing solutions, Andrew Watson has just added brand to his remit after leading the EMEA marketing and digital teams at hotel group Marriott International for the past three years.
Over that time, driving customer engagement with the Marriott Bonvoy digital loyalty programme and its mobile app has been a key priority. As the business announced its financial results for 2022, CEO Tony Capuano hailed the “powerful” scheme – which now has 177 million members – as a “key driver of demand”.
After enduring the sharpest downturn in its history during Covid-19, Marriott International reported record results for 2022, with total revenues up 50% to $20.8bn. Digital revenues climbed 41%, as the number of mobile app users rose 32%.
Capuano promised further investment in the business’s “highly profitable” digital channels this year. As part of delivering that, Watson helped to launch the global ‘Roam Around the World’ campaign for Marriott Bonvoy in April. With the tagline ‘Where can we take you?’, the campaign encourages customers to browse the company’s 30 hotel brands on its mobile app, promising memorable and diverse experiences across the portfolio.■
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