Building a brand. The travel and hospitality industry.

Published in

Erretres Insights

5 min readNov 12, 2019

As travellers and their needs evolve, brands need to redesign their brand experience in a way that enriches the traveller’s experience in a unique way.

The travel and hospitality industry has been growing and changing at a rapid pace. New types of travellers are emerging and opportunities are rife for businesses to provide these travellers with memorable experiences. At Erretres, we have worked with different service providers catering to travellers. This has helped us develop a solid understanding of the appeal of strong brands within this sector. In a crowded and competitive industry like travel and hospitality that encompasses a wide variety of services, some of the things that brands must ensure are:

Differentiation and loyalty.

With so many companies offering similar services, customers are less likely to prefer just one particular brand. Telling a unique brand story with well-designed identity and communications can foster loyalty among the target audience.

Consistency across touchpoints.

An experience is on-brand only when it is consistent throughout the customer journey.Through internal brand activation and strategic design, brands can deliver a coherent and memorable experience.

Relationship beyond the travel phase.

For travellers, the travel experience starts before the journey starts and extends even after the journey ends. Forging a relationship at relevant stages of this broader journey via a clear brand link is vital.

Differentiation and loyalty with a brand identity that resonates with the organization and the audience.

Building a brand around the service offered will place your brand in the same sphere as others that offer the same service. Placing an emphasis on the unique attribute that can not only define your organization but also allow strong associations to be made by your audience is key for differentiation and loyalty.

Our project for Hammam-Al-Andalus highlights this by building an identity around a few exceptional details instead of too many predictable traits. Less is more.

Consistency across touchpoints through the synergy of strategy and design.

Brand experiences will fail to stand out if the presence of the brand does not transmit the same ideas and emotions across various stages of the customer journey. Through varying contexts, the brand needs to be adaptable to consistently represent its same core values.

In our Hammam rebranding, we formulated the culture that the brand needs to embrace to allow it to deliver a consistent experience across various outlets and touchpoints.

Our rebranding for Civitatis involved developing a visual identity that supports the business expansion from an online booking service to a fully-fledged travel brand that includes informational websites, physical stores, an app, and other touchpoints.

A relationship beyond the travel phase by extending the brand in a relevant manner.

Excitement and curiosity are the emotions a traveller feels during their pre-travel phase, and they become a sense of nostalgia and reminiscence after their travels. A brand that enables them to express or live these moments can go a long way in establishing itself as the preferred entity for authentic travel experiences.

For our Civitatis project, the brand had various websites acting as a location guide for each destination. Organizing these sub-brands and the primary corporate brand of Civitatis, we positioned the brand as a reliable guide for travellers, thus attracting new customers and building loyalty.

B2B: Establishing a B2B brand as a partner that potential clients can believe in.

When dealing with B2B companies, clients look for a long-term relationship with businesses, and for this reason the values and ambitions of these businesses matter more to them. These aspects must therefore be clearly reflected across the business’ portfolio.

With IHP, through design and strategy, we enabled the brand to position itself as the trusted partner for hospitality projects. The key information and the team’s expertise with their past projects were communicated in an effective way.

To find out more about these travel and hospitality branding projects, follow the links below: