Travel Lounge

What does a travel company do when no one can travel?
During the height of the pandemic, Contiki faced a wave of cancellations and a hard stop on new bookings. We needed a way to retain travelers, keep the brand relevant, and build anticipation for future departures—without selling trips in the traditional sense.

Enter the Contiki Travel Lounge: my idea to create exclusive Facebook groups for each trip departure, tapping into our audience's most-used platform to keep future travelers engaged. These digital lounges connected travelers with the people they’d be exploring with—helping spark the on-trip bonding experience before departure. We seeded destination excitement, delivered critical travel updates, and offered roulette-style discounts and bonus experiences to keep momentum high.

The result? Travelers stayed excited, informed, and far less likely to cancel. The Lounge became a powerful pre-trip ritual—driving retention, minimizing refund losses, and strengthening brand loyalty when it mattered most.

What started as a crisis response became a permanent part of Contiki’s pre-trip experience—now rolled out for every departure.