How Great Rail Journeys builds trust across a 6-month booking journey

Great Rail Journeys has been running escorted rail tours for over 50 years, taking customers across Europe, Canada, India, New Zealand, and beyond. They operate two brands: Great Rail Journeys in the UK and Vacations by Rail in the US.

A 6-month decision deserves more than a generic email

Booking a rail tour isn’t like buying a pair of shoes. For most Great Rail Journeys customers, it’s a 3 to 6 month research process. They browse destinations, compare departures, read about experiences, and then more often than not, pick up the phone to actually book. Around 60% of customers still convert offline.

That creates a long, fragmented journey with a lot of room for doubt to creep in. And for a brand where the average trip is a significant investment, doubt is expensive.
The team knew that sending the same emails to everyone, regardless of what they’d been looking at, how close they were to booking, or whether they’d traveled before, wasn’t doing justice to that journey. A customer researching a Swiss alpine tour and a first-time visitor browsing New Zealand have completely different needs. Treating them the same way risked losing both.

“When someone’s been researching a trip for months, the last thing they need is an email that has nothing to do with what they were looking at,” Daniel says. “We needed our communications to reflect the journey each customer was actually on.”

The goal wasn’t to send more. It was to make every touchpoint count, and to build the kind of trust that turns a long consideration phase into a confirmed booking.

Smarter signals, not more sends

Great Rail Journeys had been with Dotdigital since 2017, steadily building out data integrations, web behavior tracking, and automated journeys over the years. Adding Fresh Relevance and a Trustpilot integration gave the team the final pieces: the ability to act on customer behavior in real time, and to bring genuine social proof into the moment it matters most.

Showing customers what they actually want to see

When someone adds a tour to their basket and doesn’t book, they now get an email that plays back exactly what they were looking at: the tour, the departure date, the price. If that departure only has a handful of spaces left, that’s in there too.

“Scarcity signals make a real difference when someone’s on the fence. We’re not just reminding them what they looked at. We’re giving them a reason to act.” Daniel Tangen, Head of Marketing Solutions, Great Rail Journeys.

Browse abandonment gets a softer approach. Rather than pushing a specific tour, those emails highlight the experiences and destinations that caught the customer’s eye. A follow-up a few days later introduces alternative tours in the same region or price range if the first email doesn’t land.

{Screenshot: browse abandonment email showing destination highlights and recommended alternative tours}

Trust signals that do the heavy lifting

For a considered, high-ticket purchase, reassurance isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s part of what gets someone over the line.

Great Rail Journeys worked with Trustpilot to bring real customer reviews directly into the booking journey, both on-site and in email. Through the Dotdigital and Trustpilot integration, review data is pulled in as insight records, meaning abandoned basket emails don’t just remind customers what they were looking at. They include reviews from real travelers who took that specific tour.

The impact on-site tells the same story. Embedding Trustpilot reviews on tour listing pages produced an 8% uplift in conversion rate, with the strongest effect on higher-priced tours. Exactly where trust matters most.

“When you’re asking someone to spend a significant amount of money on a trip they’ve been thinking about for months, a real review from someone who just came back from that exact holiday carries real weight. It’s the closest thing to word of mouth we can put in front of them.” Daniel Tangen, Head of Marketing Solutions, Great Rail Journeys

{Screenshot: tour listing page showing embedded Trustpilot reviews, ideally a higher-priced tour}

{Screenshot: abandoned basket or browse email showing Trustpilot review block for that specific tour}

A journey built around where the customer actually is

Personalization doesn’t stop at the basket. Nurture emails for new customers balance brand storytelling with content tailored to the destinations they’ve been browsing, so someone researching Japan gets a different experience to someone circling European city breaks.

Next up is a post-trip stream timed around a simple but powerful insight: the first 30 days after returning from a holiday is when customers are most likely to be thinking about the next one. It will draw on everything Great Rail Journeys already knows: where the customer traveled, who their tour manager was, and what they rated highly. If someone just came back from Switzerland and gave their tour manager a glowing score, they’ll hear about that guide’s upcoming departures.

“We know the signals are there,” Daniel says. “It’s about building journeys that actually use them, so customers feel like we know them, not just that we have their email address.”

A connected picture across channels

Email sits at the center of the strategy. But the same customer data is increasingly being pushed into Google and Meta via Dotdigital’s ads integration, building lookalike audiences and running targeted follow-up campaigns. Email disengagement is even being used as a trigger for paid social win-back, reaching customers who’ve gone quiet on email through the channels where they’re still active.

Scarcity signals make a real difference when someone’s on the fence. We’re not just reminding them what they looked at. We’re giving them a reason to act.

Daniel Tangen, Head of Marketing Solutions, Great Rail Journeys

Building confidence at every stage pays off

The program is still growing, but the early signals are clear.

• 8% uplift in conversion rate from Trustpilot reviews on tour listing pages, with the strongest effect on higher-priced tours
• 43% abandoned basket unique open rate year to date
• 7.4% automation revenue contribution year to date

Still plenty to build

The next frontier is bringing Fresh Relevance onto the website itself, extending the same behavior-based personalization customers already experience in email to every page they visit. Messaging tailored specifically to solo travelers is also in progress, adjusting tone and content for someone traveling alone rather than as a couple. And WhatsApp is on Daniel’s radar for the next 6 to 12 months, particularly given how naturally it fits a mobile-first research journey.

“We know there are signals we haven’t even started exploring yet,” Daniel says. “That’s actually exciting. It means there’s a lot still to come.”