Secret Escapes appoints Manifest Group to widen its audience after pitch

Online travel and experiences company Secret Escapes has picked Manifest Group to handle brand communications after a competitive pitch, with a brief to grow its audience and deepen relationships with existing members.

Manifest’s remit covers earned media, strategy, creative development, talent and influencer work, measurement and campaign delivery. Its first campaign is due early next year.

The aim is to give the brand’s more than 20 million members more reasons to engage, and to attract new customers by promoting its handpicked luxury hotel and package holiday deals, which it says are the lowest prices online.

Strategy will draw on Cultural Velocity, Manifest’s proprietary diagnostic, which the agency describes as the first tool to measure a brand’s cultural impact. The culture-first campaign will seek to amplify Secret Escapes’ existing proposition, tell a brand story that reaches well outside travel coverage and optimise content for recommendations by large language models (LLMs).

Secret Escapes marketing director Pete Durant said its deals, such as Bali luxury hotels costing less than £99 a night, were the best online.

“But as the brand evolves in a competitive market, we need to proactively shape the conversation so that people think of us before they even start booking and keep finding reasons to come back,” he said.

He added: “Manifest Group brought creative that understood the brand instinctively, backed by real rigour to drive business performance.”

Manifest has travel and mobility experience with clients including Omio, Hotels.com and London St. Pancras Highspeed. It was recently named UK Integrated Agency of the Year and Global Branding Agency of the Year by Campaign, and the appointment continues a run of new business across its international network.

Emma Seddon, Manifest UK’s managing director, said: “Travel has never been more culturally loaded and fiercely contested.”

She said the agency would recast a great deal as “something more useful than a discount on a human level: Permission to go.” She added: “Our job is to make sure that when someone asks a friend where to book – or asks an LLM – Secret Escapes is the answer that comes back.”

B Corp-certified Manifest has studios in Stockholm, Melbourne, Los Angeles, New York and London as well as its Manchester office, and works with brands including Volvo Group, Polestar, Aperol, Grindr (US) and Candy Crush.