What you need to know:

• Covid forced Intreprid’s Chief Customer Officer Leigh Barnes to move beyond his long career allegiance to digital performance marketing.
• The company’s first ever brand campaign across global markets has delivered “surprising” results – branded search volumes and website traffic are up 40 per cent, direct bookings have jumped 20 points to 60 per cent of total sales, leading to record revenues.
• With a long commitment to ESG – Barnes was previously Chief Purpose Officer – he says says sustainability and social values are important but play second fiddle to product excellence and the experience is “first and foremost”. 
• Cashed-up baby boomers, professional 30-somethings and families are key customers – and Intrepid backs Commbank iQ’s spending analysis of 7 million customers showing travel is booming despite widespread cuts in other discretionary and essential categories.   
• Live chat has become Intrepid’s biggest service and sales channel post-Covid. “We're starting to look at how we might use AI and move to that because it's getting to such a point that the use case is there: we now get more revenue and interactions there than from any other channel,” per Barnes. 

Gulping humble pie

Intrepid Travel’s former performance marketing boss, who led its North American operation from $10m to $100m in revenues, became Chief Purpose Officer and morphed to Chief Customer Officer, is gulping humble pie – gladly. 

The “pub test” on Leigh Barnes mates failed and failed – even after years working for Intrepid wearing the merch, they still didn’t really know what Intrepid did. 

Barnes says until last year when it launched its brand campaign across Canada, US, UK and Australia, budgets at Intrepid were allocated 90 per cent to performance marketing and direct response tactics.  

Then Covid delivered a “punch in the face moment” for Barnes which had him, for the first time, devouring virtual Professor Mark Ritson’s gospel along with System 1’s Jon Evans and advertising effectiveness luminaries Peter Field and Les Binet. 

He admits a heady cocktail of Ritson, Evans, Binet, Field and talking to customers about their messy choice-making purchase journeys was enough “to get over myself and my preconceived ideas”. 

Barnes subsequently launched “Travel is back” - Intrepid’s first brand campaign in the company’s performance marketing-skewed history via Melbourne “brand and culture studio” SouthSouthWest. Then he sweated.

Digital performance, born and bred 

“I was going a bit grey,” he quips. “I’ve been a performance born-and-bred digital marketer most of my life but we really took an approach that to survive and grow we needed to get beyond ad hoc and performance marketing and get more people seeing and knowing and thinking about Intrepid. Because humans are messy, the way they choose is messy. They need to be nudged towards your brand and if you do that well, that’s going to have a long-term effect on your business and the short-term as well. We are already seeing better performance marketing results. A lot of other travel companies had stopped spending and we were able to rebrand the business.”

Barnes says as the campaign rolled out in various markets “surprising” things happened. “Straight away we saw an increase in people coming to the homepage from the cities that we were doing the majority of the spending in,” he says. “So almost immediately in London we had a 30-40 per cent increase in branded search terms and people coming to the home page, which we would never have seen before. We also saw this effect happen much more in Australia where we had an improvement in conversion. Because people trusted us more or knew about us, we saw conversions jump. There was that halo from the brand work.”

Direct bookings rise

Barnes says “another big shift” brought about by the Travel is Back campaign was more customers booking directly with Intrepid. “That again has shifted from about 40 per cent of customers pre-pandemic to upwards of 60 per cent now. That's been a big change. And what we've seen there is just the rapid growth of North America and the UK – faster than Australia. Our brand was pretty small when we went into those markets and now it's growing and I think those two markets will overtake Australia in the next five years. But it's years of groundwork. We've been in those markets substantially for 15 years now, and we're reaping the benefit.”

Barnes says right now business is booming and he’s seen no evidence of customer spending cutbacks – in line with recent Commbank iQ data of 7 million cardholders which shows travel and experience remains a high-growth area despite discretionary spending cuts elsewhere, including essentials. 

Record sales – thanks boomers

“Overall when I look at the numbers we have record sales,” says Barnes. “We’ve had our biggest months ever. We've had our biggest days ever. January was our best January ever. We are above budgeted targets, so performance is better than what we've had for usual spend ratios. We're above where we would normally be at this time of year so all those higher levels of profit, sales, revenue – they are coming through. A really important metric for us is trip fill. You've got to imagine that we want trips running like an airline – as close as you can to capacity. And we're already hitting our trip fill targets for this time of year after having a year of no bookings, very low bookings leading in.”

What about ESG, Mr Purpose?

Intrepid has long been on the ESG road trip – it’s been carbon neutral since 2012 and is a certified B Corp company. As the company’s former Chief Purpose Officer, how much of the feel-good, do-good stuff does he attribute to winning over customers versus the experience and exotic locations Intrepid is renowned for – think Patagonia, Alaska, Costa Rica and the Balkans.

“I probably haven't broken it down like that but the core things still remain true,” he says. “The product has to be great, it has to be the right price and has to fit with the customer's itinerary time. So product excellence and giving that experience is first and foremost. They're not going to book us if we're sustainable and we've got a shit trip. Experience is the highest thing. Sustainability comes afterwards. It’s one of the reasons why customers travel with us again and it's why they recommend us to a friend.

"After the trip they say it was done responsibly – we did the right things on the trip. That comes through loud and clear. The other thing is because we are doing the right thing, customers are more likely to have heard about us. So we see that come through. They may know about us or be nudged towards us because they've heard, read or seen some of the work that we're doing.”

More broadly, Barnes says Intrepid is benefiting from rising demand for rich experiences. “It's not about just sitting on the beach, they want to go and eat the food, interact with the culture, walk, engage, drink, eat – do all those things and our product gives that. But customers more and more are wanting to make sure that they have minimal impact when they travel and they're doing it in the right way," says Barnes. "That’s a big shift and we see it more and more everywhere. Everything is moving in that space and travel is just part of that. The whole market of people moving towards adventure style and experience riches has moved towards us, which is helping fuel our growth.”

CX, chatbots and AI

Barnes has also been streamlining the customer experience – Intrepid uses Salesforce CRM and much work has been underway in processes, tech and people to improve the ease of interactions for customers with the company. Live chat, says Barnes, is booming. 

“Our focus has been just to remove any of those hurdles from a process point of view and then also trying to make it as easy as possible for customers to interact from a tech point of view. So live chat has become one of our biggest channels now for booking and servicing customers. That wasn't the case pre-pandemic. We're starting to look at how we might use AI and move to that because it's getting to such a point that the use case is there: we now get more revenue and interactions from that than any other channel. We will start to play around with some AI and bot stuff – but we still want to keep that human touch in there.”

For now, though, Barnes and the Intrepid team is hurtling towards their $1bn revenue target. “We were on track before the pandemic,” he says. “We're going to probably be there for 2025. Last year we did about $370m in revenue. This year we'll do around $600m and we should be on track if we continue that growth into a billion dollars by the end of 2025.” 

By then, he may have even passed the pub test.