Tui and Monarch justify ‘one brand’ strategies

Two of the UK travel industry’s most influential entities have justified their brand alignment strategies at this week’s 2015 ABTA Convention in Costa Navarino, Greece. 

Tui UK & Ireland managing director Nick Longman and Monarch Group CEO Andrew Swaffield both told delegates their single brand policies would eradicate customer bewilderment.

“The customers journey has been confusing, so moving from Thomson to Tui will help,” said Longman. “It will also enable us to grow our business.”

He was speaking following news last week that the TUI Group has launched its international oneBrand campaign, which will see each of its major European tour operator brands rebadged using the TUI master brand by 2017.

The group’s Dutch subsidiary, Arke, is the first to receive the corporate treatment with the group’s operations in France, Belgium, the Nordics and the UK to follow over the next two years.

“The Tui brand has wider appeal than Thomson,” said Longman. “We now have to work on what that brand means.

“At the moment, if Tui was a woman, it would be Mary Berry, but we would like it to be more like Uma Thurman.”

In a similar move, Swaffield announced last week that the established and well loved Cosmos Holidays brand is to become known as Monarch as the airline and tour operator move towards a “single brand strategy”.

Trade-only brands Avro and somewhere2stay.com will also be Monarch branded and a new agent portal, monarchagents.co.uk, will be launched by the end of the year.

However, the Cosmos name will continue to be used by Cosmos Tours, which trades as Cosmos Tours and Cruises, a separate entity that was not subject to Monarch’s Greybull Capital led rescue plan.

“It makes total sense to have one brand,” said Swaffield.

Monarch is working with global brand strategy and design consultancy, Lippincott, to refine its branding to reflect the group’s new unified brand strategy.