Building Awareness for a New Travel Brand in the Middle of the Pandemic

Summary

Ya Vas is a vacation packages brand launched by Volaris in 2019. It provides travelers with everything they need for a fantastic trip, including hotels, transfers, insurance, and experiences. Shortly after launching, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down travel, leaving Ya Vas to build brand awareness and generate sustainable traffic to their site during a challenging time for the travel industry. 

Ya Vas used airTRFX to deploy a low-cost SEO strategy to create brand awareness and capture existing demand by gaining positions for organic search keywords. They also interlinked Ya Vas airTRFX pages on the Volaris website to take advantage of Volaris’ traffic. By launching destination and custom pages at scale, Ya Vas gained positions in Google search results and used fare marketing strategies to drive awareness and directonline sales.

Ya Vas gained positioning in Google search engine results for their keywords within the first six months after launching airTRFX and has continued to see SEO improvements.

Challenge

In their first year after launching, Ya Vas needed to capture the existing travel demand in the market. People were booking domestic travel but were unaware of the Ya Vas brand. Ya Vas was competing with more established Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) with large marketing budgets to drive traffic to their sites. OTAs focus their marketing efforts on paid search and SEO channels so that they appear in the first positions on Google search results. 

Ya Vas used airTRFX to launch a massive infrastructure of landing pages for every destination they offer in a scalable way that their small team could easily manage. These landing pages contained real-time prices for Ya Vas vacation packages and provided a long-term SEO solution to push relevant products according to what customers were searching for.  To gain positions in Google, Ya Vas created localized campaigns in areas where Volaris had a strong presence and brand recognition. Within six months, they saw improvement in their position in search results, and their positions have continued to move up in rankings.

Launching airTRFX was a low-cost strategy that preserved their budget and also optimized paid media. With these custom pages, Ya Vas could explore incremental traffic keywords to appear for all of the queries that are relevant to their market.

As a result, Ya Vas not only survived the most difficult time for travel brands, but it gained awareness and is still improving in SEO performance today. 

“As a low cost strategy, airTRFX was the best way to preserve budget, optimize paid media, and gain positioning on Google in only 6 months”

Ana Isbel Chavez, Head of Performance Marketing at Ya Vas