Skift Take
Lindblad Expeditions is trying to reach affluent, active travelers with plenty of time to spend exploring as the company embarks on a five-year growth plan.
Editor's Note: Following our previous CEO interview series in online travel, hospitality, and destinations, Skift has launched a new series, this time focused on Chief Marketing Officers.
To better understand the big marketing challenges facing travel brands in an age when consumers are in control, Skift's What Keeps CMOs Up at Night will talk with the leading voices in global marketing from across all the industry's sectors.
These interviews with leaders of hotels, airlines, tourism boards, digital players, agents, tour operators and more will explore both shared and unique challenges they are facing, where they get insights, and how they best leverage digital insights to make smarter decisions.
This is the latest interview in the series.
Lindblad Expeditions has been busy this past year, and not just with small-ship voyages to the Galapagos, Antarctica and other destinations.
The expedition travel company completed a merger with Capitol Acquisition Corp. II in July, went public, and late last year announced plans to build two new ships and acquire a third.
Lindblad, which owns six ships and charters another four seasonally, has set a goal of growing from 20,000 to 30,000 guests a year over the next five years.
Chief marketing officer Rich Fontaine is charged with helping to achieve that growth, particularly among the company's core demographic of active recent retirees.
Fontaine, who joined Lindblad Expeditions in July of 2013 after spending 18 years at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, spoke to Skift about why TV advertising is tricky, the importance of offering a better customer experience, and how climate change is changing the business.
Skift: When you joined, what did you see at that point as the real opportunities for you to tell the Lindblad story?
Rich Fontaine: There's not one silver bullet that was going to say, 'Hey we can drive 30% growth in the business over the next five years if all of a sudden we focus exclusively on this.'
We are a multi-channel marketer across both direct channels and trade marketing channels, and obviously we have a very critical, invaluable alliance with National Geographic who we picked up as a partner of ours. Those were all things that I evaluated and challenged my team to say, 'Where are there incremental opportunities
