At its conference today in Costa Mujeres, The Advantage Travel Partnership said that members who engage in its product communities and marketing initiatives are seeing a strong increase in bookings.

The Partnership says that the number of members engaging with their cruise community under the ‘Latitude’ brand, has increased overall by 50% in the last 12 months, and cruise passenger numbers have gone up by 150% across the membership generally during the same period.

Latitude membership offers a wide range of benefits to those who participate in the programme such as: dedicated ship visits, an annual cruise conference; increased commercial benefits and incentives for members; and dedicated marketing.

Another of its product communities – Explorers - which focuses on the Adventure and Touring sector, has seen a 490% increase in the number of members visiting this area of its member's hub.  Currently, the Partnership generates a combined annual turnover of £39 million in the Adventure and Touring sector.

Across the Partnership’s Luxury Connoisseur proposition, more than £219m of luxury travel product is retailed each year with further growth expected in line with the anticipated growth of luxury travel. This proposition offers a range of dedicated marketing activities including a consumer magazine and specialist communications in the Luxury space.

As part of the offering across all its community-based programmes, Advantage provides a range of consumer magazines each year, which in 2023 led to over £10m in bookings for members. Alongside this Advantage runs an extensive e-mail marketing programme and during the last 12 months over 11,000 bookings have been generated for members from this proposition.

Kelly Cookes, Chief Commercial Officer, The Advantage Travel Partnership, said: “Whilst we operate a centralised commercial buying strategy to leverage our scale for members, we also have specialists in each product area and sector who can specifically support members with driving volume.  By having defined product communities, we can also tailor specific offers, products and services to support members, and this is helping to drive significant incremental sales for them.

“Our marketing offering is best in class and the majority of what we offer in this area is free to our members and how we use this community-based approach to support members with segmenting customer types, drives more targeted marketing and is resulting in achieving healthy booking figures.

“We encourage all members to engage with our marketing services and product communities which is clearly delivering tangible, financial benefits for all those that do, underpinning our strategy of offering members a one-stop-business-hub for all their needs.”