Randal Deer’s Ignite Travel Group lights up travel world

ONE Gold Coast company has been a pioneer in the travel industry — making its owner millions of dollars. This is how he did it.

Ignite Travel founder Randall Deer has big plans for the tourism operator. Picture: Adam Head

IGNITE Travel Group is fast expanding its reach in the lucrative holiday market and founder Randall Deer has major plans for the company to become an owner, not just a distributer, of tourism assets.

Mr Deer founded Broadbeach-based Ignite in 2005 after leaving BreakFree Holidays Ltd, where he was chief finance officer.

The business, which now has three divisions, started with just one — Rewards Corp — which essentially sold travel vouchers to companies looking to sell more product, such as phones and tyres.

However, when the Global Financial Crisis struck, marketing managers started to become more conservative with their budgets, and Mr Deer found he had to reinvent the business.

What he did was take his knowledge of the hotel and accommodation market, and develop holiday packages that appealed to time-poor middle-Australians.

Mr Deer said he identified there was excess capacity in the industry during non-peak periods, and those rooms could be sold with the right marketing approach.

He gives Sofitel in Broadbeach as an example.

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“The Sofitel with 200 rooms here might run 95 per cent over Christmas but it might run 50 per cent in May. Even though its still a great time to come to the Gold Coast,” he said.

“Say if clients pay $100 per room, that is $10,000 Sofitel is getting but 100 rooms are going unused. So I would go to Sofitel and say, ‘I can buy 30 rooms for $100, and that is an extra $3000’.”

However, Mr Deer said, he could not offer a cheaper product, because the industry works based on parity, meaning, essentially, everyone gets the same deal.

“So I thought what I’m going to do is work out how to work with very few partners. I’m going to sell lots of bookings to those partners, and I’ll buy them better than anyone else, which will allow me to build a better package than anyone else. But I’m not going to do it cheaper, because that would conflict the market. I’ll make it the same price but include more.”

Mr Deer said the other aspect to his approach was to create “holidays in a box” — for people who were undecided on their next holiday destination.

“I saw that the old-style advertisements don’t inspire you to go somewhere, it facilitates you when you know where you’re going,” he said.

“The idea I had was to inspire people to look at places they were not thinking about.

“It isn’t to show the cheapest deals or just one piece of a holiday, such as the flights, but a complete package with loads of inclusions.”

Randall Deer, managing director of Ignite Travel Group. Picture: Adam Head

Mr Deer said it meant they didn’t offer customers the option to alter packages, but that didn’t matter.

“If you want less nights, we say that is what is included in the package. Just stay less, it is still going to be cheaper. Because if you want all these value-adds you have to buy what we are selling. We have condensed it to the best rooms, in the best hotels, with the best experiences.”

Mr Deer said as a result of the strategy, Ignite has grown by 50 to 100 per cent every year for the past eight years.

Fiji was the first destination launched (under the Myfiji brand) and then a number of others including Bali (Mybali).

Ignite now has 15 destinations it sells and has recently launched the Get Luxe brand.

Mr Deer said Ignite would look to buy its own tourism assets, including hotels, in the near future.