Selling a holiday that looks too good to be true

Travely is a digital-first travel agency: book the holiday you actually want in a few taps, in one app. We took them into social media from a standing start.

The problem with a proposition that clean is that nobody believes it. Booking a trip has always meant tabs, comparison sites, a phone call to someone who will get back to you. An app that collapses all of that into a minute sounds like a claim rather than a service — too good to be true.

What we did

So rather than arguing the point, we agreed with it. The launch look book showed destinations that were deliberately unreal — fairy-tale colonnades, impossible pastel coastlines, places that plainly do not exist as photographed.

That let the two halves do separate jobs. The imagery carried the feeling of the holiday, pitched openly as a fantasy. The app carried the ordinary, believable part: search, tap, booked. Nobody had to pretend the pictures were documentary, and the promise stopped sounding like a claim.

The result

The content reached tens of thousands of viewers across Estonia and the neighbouring Baltic markets, over 10 million impressions in total — and 380 tours booked through the app in the first three months after launch.