Helping Holiday Club Resorts boost growth with a digital-first customer journey

Holiday Club Resorts, like many travel and leisure companies, faced a familiar challenge: the need to find new growth by reaching customer groups that their traditional sales approach had not been able to engage. It is one of Finland’s leading travel and leisure companies, offering more than 30 destinations, including eight spa resorts and over 2,200 holiday homes across Finland, Sweden, and Spain.

Holiday Club Resorts partnered with Columbia Road to create a scalable digital customer acquisition and sales concept for their holiday ownership business, delivering a seamless digital experience that attracts new customer groups and scales easily across resorts.

The starting point: designing and building a scalable customer acquisition model

Holiday Club Resorts sought to develop a digital customer acquisition and sales strategy to accelerate holiday home timeshare sales. The goal was twofold: reach new potential customer groups, especially younger families and couples, while also serving existing customers better in digital channels and converting them into owners.

The concept was first developed and piloted at the Vierumäki resort, providing a live testing ground for ideas and execution. From the very beginning, the model was designed for scalability, to be easily replicated across other Holiday Club's resorts and potential target groups. Scalability brings efficiency, measurability, and the ability to improve continuously.

At its core, the business benefit is clear: a systematic digital model that supports sales growth, improves customer experience, and demonstrates business impact with data. This laid the foundation for a repeatable, modern sales approach that serves both the customer and the business.

Our approach: Customer-focused and design-led concepting, prototyping, and testing

We applied a customer-centric and design-led process that took the project from planning to execution and measurement.

• Business alignment: We started by defining business objectives and KPIs to ensure the concept tied directly to commercial goals.
• Target groups and value propositions: We identified potential target groups, focusing on younger families and couples, and clarified the unique value propositions for each.
• Benchmarking and ideation: Drawing inspiration from real estate and other relevant industries, we ideated, prioritised, and wireframed potential solutions for digital customer acquisition and sales.
• Commercialisation of the service for digital channels: Together, we translated the somewhat abstract service into a concrete, sellable holiday experience – with clear key messages and practical value propositions.
• Prototyping and execution: The prototype provided a tangible base to move into implementation. We launched the concept online and tested it with real customers.
• Measurement from day one: A real-time measurement framework was implemented to track results, validate business impact, and enable continuous optimisation.

The outcome was a concrete, digital-first customer acquisition and sales concept, tested, validated, and ready to scale.

Impact: measurable results from day one

Within just the first months, the concept was already showing a concrete business impact. Hundreds of warm sales leads were generated and handed over to sales, and conversions could be tracked all the way through to closed deals.

Key impacts include:

• A successful and scalable digital customer acquisition concept that accelerates sales.
• A model ready to replicate across other resorts and potential customer segments.
• Commercialised sales materials for sales teams to use in meetings, helping them close deals more effectively and faster.
• New ways of working with a practical, data-driven approach to sales – making impact measurable and optimisation continuous.

Next steps: Scaling across other resorts

With the first pilot proving its value, the next step is to scale the concept across other Holiday Club Resorts. Future rollouts will build on the same scalable framework, while data and learnings from the first pilots guide ongoing optimisation.

By combining systematic digital acquisition with strong sales execution, Holiday Club Resorts now has a modern, repeatable model that drives growth and a blueprint for the future of digital hospitality.