With new SaaS-based video tool, OAT Travel gets a hike in conversions

To win over customers, Overseas Adventure Travel likes to romance visitors to OATTravel.com with electronic brochures that appear like scrapbooks embedded with multiple videos. Conversions rates are running as high as 10%, says Mark Frevert, executive vice president and chief architect at parent company Grand Circle Corp./Overseas Adventure Travel.

OAT Travel has developed its video-enhanced brochures with software-as-a-service video technology from SundaySky, which has enabled it to produce dozens of 8- to 10-minute videos within a few weeks, Frevert says. “We couldn’t have done this in three times the amount of time in-house,” he says.

SundaySky provides video templates that OAT has been able to modify with content for particular excursions, such as cruises down the Nile River and overland trips to Tunisia. Browsing through an online brochure entitled “Cairo and the Eternal Nile,” which is made to look like a scrapbook, visitors see a mix of textual content, static images, slide shows and videos with audio content.

Frevert says OAT has found that the longer people remain on its site, the more likely they are to book a trip. Before the SundaySky videos, he notes, OAT would see a noticeable lift in bookings when visits met a minimum of five minutes or three clicks. “Now with the videos, that lift is much higher,” he says.

Mitch Praver, president of SundaySky, says his company’s Internet-based technology platform is designed to support direct data feeds from its clients’ web content files, such as through XML feeds or application programming interfaces, to enable web site displays to automatically update with new video content.