Webjet Group CEO and Managing Director Katrina Barry spoke with travelBulletin about how the business will target business travellers, launch a new loyalty program – and move forward from past challenges.
travelBulletin: Webjet has a plan to target business travellers and create a standalone division. Is Webjet planning to limit its focus to SMEs, or will it create a division that can compete with the big boys for corporate accounts?
Katrina Barry: We’re not interested in competing with the big boys. But what we have identified is there’s this segment in the middle who need more than we can offer, but don’t need what the big boys can offer, and they want it to be a purely digital, online experience.
There was a customer we [asked], “Look, you were with us, and you were doing $125,000 of travel a year. And then you left. Tell us about that and why you liked us.”
And they said, “Well, we liked using Webjet because it was super easy. It was digitally-led. It was all online. We love the mix and match because we don’t want to fly expensive the whole time. We need to be able to save dollars because we’re a small business.
And worst-case scenario, there was always someone there on the phone 24/7, should the unthinkable happen. So it really suited our needs.”
But then they said to us, “Look, we just grew a little and it got too big, and we needed to put in place direct links back to our accounting mid office. We needed expense approvals. We needed approval hierarchies.”
There were all these pieces of tech that we don’t deliver that they left us for. They don’t need the big end of town and everyone in that space is really well-known and they do a really good job of that.
Our job is not to compete with that. It’s this really small end that want an online, digital-led offering.
They want a few more pieces of tech than we deliver today, but they love our proposition, so that is the most natural extension for us and the easiest adjacency for us to move into.
There’s a real gap for someone to disrupt in this space and [be] a local brand that’s technology-led, that’s a business OTA. There are lots of choices on how we can execute on this path.
It’s early days. But the most important thing is that we go out to our stakeholders and say, we’re pursuing this and it’s an important part of our long-term growth strategy.
travelBulletin: With a company name like Webjet, it’s pretty clear what the business currently does. But now that you are looking to expand your hotel, car, motorhome rental and insurance offerings, will that be difficult to execute?
Katrina Barry: When we speak to all our customers and we do really deep customer research, rather than just our daily NPS, customer experience scores and customer effort scores, they trust us. They love what we do on flights.
And most of them don’t even know they have the ability to connect a hotel to your package there, and sometimes get an up to 20% discount.
Webjet is an incredibly lean business, and with incredibly tight marketing budgets. So there’s a tiny bit of above the line [marketing]. Most people know it as billboards, where we talk a little bit about ‘bundle and sav’ and getting your flights and hotel together. But we do not do below-the-line marketing, so we do not market it. Most of our customers don’t even know.
Speaking [to customers] and doing the research, they said they want to book it all in one place. They want one-stop solutions. So yes, the name might be limiting, but what’s not limiting is people’s familiarity with us and the trust factor. That’s what we’re going to leverage into to say, ‘Hey, do you want your fries with that?’
travelBuilletin: Can you share some more details into Webjet’s new loyalty program, what it will be called and how it will work?
Katrina Barry: You can burn your NAB rewards points on us. And a little-known, but fun fact for everyone out there with an AmEx is you can burn Amex points on Webjet, and that’s a really distinct value that we offer.
So in terms of the plans, we have some strong views on the strategy, and there are lots of different ways to execute that. This is probably one of our biggest untapped opportunities. We know it’s really strong, but the business just hasn’t invested in this in the past.
We mentioned it today because it’s a really clear opportunity for us, but we’re only hiring now.
We don’t have a name or anything further to reveal more than that at this point in time. But the objective is to make people feel rewarded to develop deeper intimacy with our customers, closer relationships and to keep them coming back.
travelBulletin: It’s a very crowded loyalty market as well. Are there any plans in place on how Webjet will lure members across?
Katrina Barry: I don’t think we want to lure members across. We just want to reward our existing customers for coming back and that’s the objective.
I remember when I was selling tours, you could get a five perdiscount if you came back for a second time. I remember some customers saying to me, “What do you mean? This is my seventh Contiki tour or my 18th Trafalgar tour. What do you mean I only get X percent?”
We want to make sure that we’re really rewarding people when they keep coming back all the time. The goal here is less [about] buying your customer and more [about] looking after those who already are one.
travelBulletin: Brand building and raising awareness is another part of the strategy. Given the issues Webjet has faced in recent months with the ACCC and World Animal Protection, do you think it puts the business on the back foot?
Katrina Barry: I think I would view that as I’ve flushed out the bad news, I’ve cleaned up the mistakes of the past and we’re moving forward now.
The ACCC piece was from November 2023 so that was very much historical in nature. I came into my job positively engaged and worked with the ACCC on that…it focused on things like social media posts that missed an asterisk.
When you’ve got a strong brand, you’re a strong target. We worked very proactively with the ACCC.
One of my key focuses is to work with them positively and move forward. Funnily enough, we didn’t really receive a lot of consumer or investor feedback on it.
We’ve put in place robust things so that doesn’t happen again.
With the World Animal Protection [piece], I’m not going to lie, that was news to me personally as an incoming CEO, and we jumped on that immediately.
As soon as we became aware of it, we said, “Look, guys, we really can’t have these activities on our site, given they’re coming through from you.”
We got those removed and blocked as soon as we could.
We’re continuing to again engage positively with WAP to make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen again and make sure we take all necessary steps in terms of reviewing these practices.
We’ve gone through those pieces. This brand refresh that we’ll do in the middle of the year is about becoming fresh, contemporary and relevant.
travelBulletin: At first glance, the brand refresh looked very ambitious. Will five years be sufficient to complete the strategy?
Katrina Barry: We’ve got an extraordinarily detailed plan, and we’ve done the hard work on this and I can tell you, no ASX-listed CEO puts out something that they don’t think they can deliver.
My team and I are fully committed behind it. We have built in a level of conservatism to make sure that just that that very case that we do deliver.
There will be twists and turns and there are lots of moving parts, and throughout the five year period, there will be strategic choices that we make. But the great news about being an online business is you get to review, shift and pivot immediately.
As an ASX-listed CEO, you don’t put out something that you don’t think you can deliver. And we’re pretty passionate about it. We’re pretty excited and pretty committed.
