Luxury Travel Marketing: Belmond's $0 to $3.2 Billion Trip

In the 1980’s, businessman James Sherwood brought the long dormant Orient-Express luxury train service back from the dead. But reestablishing this icon for luxury and elegance was only a starting point for much more to follow.

Sherwood’s vision expanded the company’s offerings to total 7 multinational rail services throughout the UK, Europe, Peru and Southeast Asia, as well as a large portfolio of iconic hotels around the world. The collection was legendary. And the mood of Orient-Express was ‘quiet-luxury’ made manifest.

But after years of consolidation under multinational hotel management companies, coupled with the introduction of loyalty programs and OTA revenue churn, travel – even luxury travel – became commoditized. Orient-Express needed to introduce itself and its unique offering to the next generation of experience-driven luxury adventure. No point counters, thank you. For luxury travel marketing worthy of the brand, they turned to Criterion Global.

Thus began a once-in-a-lifetime journey from Orient-Express to Belmond that added +$1.34 Billion USD to the company’s market-cap…with a $3.2 Billion ending that’s peak luxury.

To accomplish this, Criterion Global, in partnership with Orient-Express’ creative agency Chandelier Creative, developed a quadrant of personas, which each quadrant personifying the idealized next generation of traveler for Orient-Express.

This ultimately manifested itself as a nuclear family, internally called the ‘Astorbilts’, with Father, Mother, Son and Daughter, each representing a respective future Orient-Express customer.

While the fight for heads-in-beds is most often fought at the ‘low-funnel (intent + data focused placements) our initial work focused on providing the next generation of luxury travelers a sense of brand and reason to believe luxury travel was best experienced with Orient-Express.

To do this Criterion Global engineered the firm’s first entirely digital media strategy. Using the Astorbilt family as our guiding north star, consumer audiences were cross-sectioned by age, income and interest and targeted through advanced consumer modeling practices

This creative content comprised a series of short film vignettes, starring the glamorous, globe-trotting fictional family. This strategy allowed for a wide array of digital content – mini-films and photo galleries, with strategic partnerships including both large publishers (i.e. the New York Times), coupled with storytelling via luxury e-retailers to showcase our video campaigns and give life to luxury ‘resort season’ travel.

Additionally, work pioneered retail media in using Net-A-Porter to target luxury shoppers with a non-endemic travel message. At the time this was unprecedented for Net-A-Porter (and most ecommerce sites), and in luxury travel marketing more broadly.

The campaign was awarded Best Digital Campaign in the UK by the Travel Marketing Awards. Memorably, the campaign generated nearly half a billion impressions targeted to HNWI and luxury travel minded audiences.

Proof the investment in brand equity worked? India’s TATA group (then owner of Taj Hotel Group) made an unsolicited offer of USD $1.86B – a 40% premium over the current share price.

But brilliant campaigns notwithstanding, James Sherwood built a brand on a borrowed name. The Orient-Express moniker actually owned by the French National Rail Service, (Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français, or more colloquially called SNCF).

But suddenly, after decades of partnership the SNCF chose not to renew the licensing agreement for the Orient-Express name, leaving the company in a strange position.

After an involved naming process the company was renamed Belmond – an amalgamation of ‘Beautiful’ and ‘World’. And to help them continue their growth under their new name, Belmond again looked to Criterion Global to navigate this transformation. Our mission became two fold:

1. 1. Continue to grow awareness and visitation to Belmond’s trains and hotels amongst luxury travelers.
   2. Increase cross-visitation between the Belmond’s offerings.

Belmond has the benefit of operating some of the world’s most important hotel properties – Cipriani Venice, Splendido Portofino, Copacapana Palace Rio, etc; Many of their properties had more recognition than the new Belmond brand itself, and incremental growth for the company was dependent on turning guests into repeat visitors across properties and offerings.

Using custom and proprietary ad tech, our ad ops and media buying teams went to work performing target audience analysis and designing a 1st party data driven strategy to encourage cross-property visitation. Additionally, we analyzed ads exposure frequency by audience subset, establishing baselines to determine how many ad exposures past guests needed to recognize the new brand, and subsequently assess their ability to name multiple properties within the portfolio.

This ultimately helped the company refine its frequency strategy, and determine key audience segmentation trends, including audience segmentation by international market. This yielded cost savings and efficient engagement within each subset audience target.

Our work for Orient-Express and Belmond is a perennial agency favorite – through innovative work across several continents and many years, we solidified a relationship with the brand that extended into their Belmond transition, through their acquisition by LVMH at a +42% premium above their market cap.