"UGC provides us with a really wonderful opportunity to show the variety of the properties, but also to understand how people in our target audience are thinking about travel." — Melanie Malurdy, Social Media Manager, Germany, PVCP
Center Parcs gives vacationers throughout Europe a new way to enjoy their holiday by offering village-style resorts boasting a variety of indoor and outdoor activities. Operating under hospitality company Pierre & Vacances, Center Parcs (PVCP) aims to both inspire travelers looking for their next destination, and authentically showcase its diverse locations through user-generated content (UGC) from customers. To bring this goal to fruition, Center Parcs looked to Emplifi.
Real customer experiences — on every channel
With 27 unique locations, robust geographic tools were crucial to the Center Parcs team in selecting a UGC vendor. Emplifi's geo-fencing feature allows the brand to create a virtual perimeter down to 500 square feet around any address and collect all UGC from within that area. With Emplifi's streamlined approach, Center Parcs is then able to seed this content across key points of the customer journey.
"It was really important from the start that we were able to use all the UGC across all our key channels, locations, and groups," said Malurdy. "From our website, email, offline communication, online communication, social media, and CRM, Emplifi makes authentic communication through those different channels possible."
Image recognition and custom tagging in the Emplifi platform cater to the activity-specific social UGC galleries live across the Center Parcs website. Each month, around 600 nights booked can be attributed to interaction with on-site UGC.
One of the main drivers of conversion, Emplifi-powered UGC helps give a better overview of the various parks to potential customers surfing the Center Parcs website. The team can also measure revenue generated from individual campaigns or even UGC to determine what types of content resonate best with its target audience.
"The typical brand photos with happy families are not working as well anymore, but UGC performs much better, and gives another depth of experience on our website," said Malurdy.
Center Parcs uses the Emplifi API to fully customize UGC widgets on-site to provide a seamless user experience and keep displays on brand. Product page galleries across the company's website saw an average engagement rate of 8%.
"UGC provides proof of authentic moments because these images are made by our customers." — Kevin Tran, Website Product Owner, PVCP
Why Emplifi UGC stands out
UGC acts as both a powerful, community-driven marketing asset and a way for the brand team to better understand its customers and the needs of consumers in the travel industry. Emplifi removes the barrier posed by manual collection and curation of UGC; giving Center Parcs immediate access to that valuable content.
The Center Parcs team also praised Emplifi for quickly adapting to their needs and acting as a strategic partner to help the brand get the most out of the platform.
"The process to source and collect UGC before Emplifi was really manual and not user-friendly," said Malurdy. "I love that you have a roadmap and that you are always wanting to improve the platform, add new features, new options, and there's always something to look forward to."
