StudentUniverse

When StudentUniverse, a niche online travel agency serving the college traveler market, decided to test PR, its initial plan was to execute a trial campaign promoting general industry and consumer awareness of the company and the value it offers to students. StudentUniverse had no idea its entire industry was going to come under the microscope and potentially disintegrate within days of its engagement with The Castle Group. The challenge was to effectively manage and prioritize media outreach for a campaign that had quickly transformed into a crisis campaign to separate StudentUniverse from its failing competitors, and evolved into a long-term opportunity to create and deliver StudentUniverse’s messages to the travel press and its main audience, college students. We initially secured coverage of the industry in news outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe, an important first step toward building awareness of StudentUniverse. The messaging developed positioned StudentUniverse as a strategic business partner with an effective transaction model, and a reliable source for students and faculty seeking online travel resources.

An Orbitz partnership was the first to come to fruition, and even though it was at the end of the spring break season, we were able to position the two companies’' joint offering as coming to the rescue of spring break travelers with a message of safe travel on brand name airlines, embracing an entirely different—and better structured—business model than its competitors.

StudentUniverse emerged from the student travel industry shake-up as a clear leader in the industry and benefited from new partnerships, better fares, greater industry and media awareness, stronger influence with academic decision makers and, most importantly, increased sales. In fact, there are many dramatic metrics that support the success of this effort, including:

• 1,000 additional sales of a specific airfare deal covered in the New York Times, based on the same promotion the year before
• PR support of a partnership and contest in conjunction with Travelocity, which generated the most Web site hits of any Travelocity campaign for the year
• More than 33 million print impressions in less than a year