Interview: Telco Circles.Life's move into travel industry with subscription product

Telco company Circles.Life has unveiled its latest  travel subscription product named Jetpac aimed at providing customers with a "seamless travel experience". According to the telco, the product was created to ease consumers of the worry of adding on roaming plans at the last minute of their travel, and also give value and power back to the consumers.  

The subscription-based product touts benefits such as unbeatable global roaming rates, monthly hotel vouchers to collect and free group lounge access in the event of flight delays. The product is open to non Circles.Life customers as well. It also enables consumers to snowball unused amounts of data and promises a SG$20 cashback in the form of vouchers through its partnerships with the likes of Expedia.

Rameez Ansar, co-founder of Circles.Life explained: “As we emerge from a post-pandemic reality, we have observed major shifts in customer behaviour and attitudes towards travelling. Recognising the pressing need for greater convenience, personalised services and a rewarding experience for users as they plan their travels, we created Jetpac as a one-stop solution to empower connectivity and create new opportunities in memories.”

In the lead up to Jetpac’s launch, Circles.Life invited users on a journey to experience a myriad of activities including a viral activation across three major locations and across MRT lines, an extensive flyer distribution event, a travel creators mixer event and its latest public event in partnership with The Pokémon Company, Dare To Roam.

Dare To Roam was held on Sunday, 30 October, and it saw around 600 participants and almost 1,000 attendees take on six curated travel challenges to experience Circles.Life.  The three grand prize winners walked away with exclusive Pokémon merchandise, attractive vouchers, and a two-year subscription of Jetpac. Visitors to the event arena were also treated to meet and greet sessions with their favourite Pokémons, a plethora of local F&B delights and immersed themselves at the Circles.Life Experience Zone, trying out Jetpac and our latest brand offerings. 

While the brand did not comment on the cost of acquisition, head of brand marketing, Ajay Sampath shared with MARKETING-INTERACTIVE that word of mouth marketing will be a key means through which the brand hopes to acquire new users. The key target audience will be those aged between 18 to 44, but also anyone who considers themselves digital natives.

When asked why the brand decided to go down the route of a subscription model, Sampath said:

If you think of subscription models, it is for people who have a predictable pattern of doing something that adds convenience and value.

“Convenience is not a problem when it comes to subscription fatigue. It is when there are multiple subscriptions, that's when consumers start questioning the value as they feel like there is a leak in the pipe which is your wallet. For us there is money back guaranteed with cashback in vouchers, so we are just trying to remove the friction,” he said.

He added that on average consumers need to make about 25 decisions before they travel, and the company hopes to bring this number down to about 10 by ultimately curating an experience for them with the power of technology and data. “The idea is to make travel curated personalised to you as long as you have this subscription. That’s the end goal when it comes to personalisation,” he said.

Currently the campaign is at its acquisition stage, and as such the team is actively identifying the right segment of users who would be interested in the new subscription product.

“Our hypothesis is that it is the people who are just about to travel who will be our main consumers at this stage. We are looking at targeted media spend on social and search for those looking to travel,” explained Sampath. As such, the brand timed its launch right ahead of the upcoming travel and holiday season.

To ensure retention at a later stage, given the subscription keeps true to Circles.Life's no contract promise, the team will be using its inhouse CRM tools to try to hold on to these consumers. “We have a good CRM system, and a lot of our marketing is done in house as we want to disrupt and move fast,” said Sampath.

“We believe when it comes to communication as a strategy, it is all about reaching the consumer at the right moment, and not just flooding with push notification. Push notifications will be limited for us, but email is a big component for us. Our current email open rate is close to 60%, and we believe this is because we don’t flood our consumers and also because our tonality is one consumers resonate with, so we will continue to bank on email,” he said.

“At the end of the day we are about giving the power back to consumers and that’s the purpose of the brand. When we broke into the market we disrupted the telco industry and brought the cost of the industry down because we had no contracts. That’s giving power back to the consumer.”

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