NEWS SPECIAL REPORT
As
Icelolly.com prepares to celebrate its 10th birthday, Lucy Huxley hears about the holiday comparison website’s plans for expansion
COMPARING NOTES:
Icelolly’s Neil Hardy (left)
and Andrew Latham;
(opposite) Gary Barlow
Icelolly won’t rest till it has A
10th birthday is not quite a ‘coming of age’, but it’s definitely a significant milestone
for
Icelolly.com, which is keen to show how much it has “grown up” in recent years.
The changes started with the £17 million management buyout in 2013, which enabled Icelolly to move to new offices in Leeds and to target further growth. The buyout was led by then
chief executive Dave Clayton and backed by Palatine Private Equity, but Clayton left soon afterwards in May 2014, and was replaced on an interim basis by Andrew Latham. Latham, whose background is in the hotels and hospitality sector, is now the full-time chief executive, and seems to be loving the permanent role. He has spearheaded a strategy
to redefine the Icelolly brand and move it forward – and has some ambitious targets. “We want to be the UK’s leading
holiday comparison website,” said Latham. “We want to be the best.” He accepts that the market leader
“The third pillar is to keep our
“We want to be the UK’s leading holiday comparison website. We want to be the best”
is
TravelSupermarket.com, but is confident Icelolly can compete. “People come to our site for
price,” said Latham. “It’s clearly a huge driver, but we also want to give people a range of product, so that they ‘think holiday, think Icelolly’.” He said Icelolly’s new strategy
featured four pillars. “The first is that we want to be inspiring. We want to offer a personalised edited service, encouraging people to do things differently,” he said. “The second is that we will
always retain our independence. We want to be known as the unbiased comparison site. Ours is not the Teletext model, with one provider.
14
travelweekly.co.uk 8 October 2015
playfulness – but more Morecambe and Wise, than alternative comedy. “And finally, we want to always
offer great quality.” Outlining some key
performance indicators for the business, Latham said: “We have 20 to 25 million visitors, with 50% completing a detailed search. We generate circa one million calls per annum. We have remarkably high customer satisfaction on those numbers. Our Net Promoter Score is 45 to 58, which is pretty good when you set it against brands such as Microsoft (48), Apple (49), Amazon (62), Tesco (8) and Waitrose (42).
Trade partners
Icelolly works with 25 trade partners on the site and has introduced much stricter criteria for providers, plus a code of conduct to which they must adhere. “In terms of suppliers on the site,
we now look at what we’ve got, and we look at new suppliers and ask what they can bring to the party. “We text everyone who phones
us on their mobile and ask them to score our service from one to five. If it falls below a certain score, then we have a code of conduct that kicks in.” Commercial and product
director Neil Hardy added: “All our suppliers have to adhere to it [the code of conduct] and if they give a bad service to our customers, there are consequences. Three strikes and you’re off. “We removed a number of key
brands. I think five big ones have gone. They have to prove they’ve made adequate changes to get back on.” Hardy said that as well as calls
from Icelolly, partners get real metrics to help them sell more. “Each week we send our trade partners our search data, and that includes our failed search report where they can see what people were looking for and couldn’t find because we didn’t have stock,” he added. “Our premium partners would look at that and upload the in-demand stock we have missing within about two hours. “We’re very responsive and
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