From turbulence to take-off

As a partner of London Gatwick Airport, we’ve already been driving awareness of the airport’s unrivalled accessibility through the Sorry for the Convenience campaign, highlighting the extensive rail connections to Gatwick.

Building on this, London Gatwick approached us to promote a key development of the Great Western Railway (North Downs Line): the doubling of train services from Reading to London Gatwick Airport.

The Brief

We took on the challenge of going beyond awareness and influencing real-world behaviour in the world’s most competitive airport city by supporting the GWR North Downs Line through targeted paid activity. This new partnership marked a significant step change in connectivity, with train frequency from Reading to London Gatwick doubling from one to two trains per hour.

In this phase, our objective shifted from perception to action. With Gatwick receiving approval for its £2.2bn Northern Runway expansion, expected to boost turnover by £1bn annually, it faced growing public scrutiny around its environmental impact. To support the case for expansion, Gatwick needed to demonstrate a tangible shift towards more sustainable passenger behaviours as part of their 2030 Net Zero strategy.

The campaign set out to:

• Drive awareness that the trains per hour from Reading to London Gatwick have doubled.
• Increase the proportion of passengers travelling to Gatwick via public transport, specifically rail.

The Audience

The campaign focused on leisure travellers within key catchment areas who may typically consider Heathrow over London Gatwick, falling within the 25–44 age range, though profiles did extend beyond this.

Priority targeting focused on high-opportunity locations with strong links to train lines and competitive overlap with Heathrow Airport.

The Strategy

The integrated campaign was built around a high-reach awareness strategy, designed to introduce more frequent train services and shift perceptions around accessibility to London Gatwick.

Despite being the best-connected airport in Britain by rail, Gatwick faced a critical perception gap: travellers do not make airport transport decisions based on logic or infrastructure, but on habit. Car travel remains the default, driven by a perceived sense of control, even when faster, more sustainable alternatives exist.

This shaped our core focus: addressing misconceptions around convenience, particularly:

• A lack of awareness around train frequency.
• An underestimation of how easy it is to travel to Gatwick.

Our strategy was built on a simple but powerful insight: while airport choice is often dictated by flight timings and destination, transport to the airport is still in play. Rather than competing solely at the point of flight booking, we targeted this overlooked moment of decision: how people choose to get to the airport.

To maximise impact, we:

• Identified “conversion catchments” where Gatwick had the strongest opportunity to gain market share from competitor airports.
• Excluded regions where Gatwick was already dominant, ensuring investment focused on incremental growth.
• Prioritised high-frequency, high-attention channels to build mental availability at scale.

Our key messaging centred around:

• Your dream destination is closer than you think. 
• From your local station to dream destinations.
• Two trains per hour to London Gatwick, connecting you to the world.
• Discover a simpler way to London Gatwick – with trains every 30 minutes.

Using post-campaign research from 2024, we knew audiences responded more strongly to clarity over humour, with a clear demand for practical, myth-busting messaging around airport access. Crucially, audio emerged as a highly effective channel for capturing attention during planning and commuting moments.

This shaped a media strategy designed not just to inform, but to recondition behaviour, embedding rail travel as the default choice for Gatwick passengers.

An integrated approach across four media channels was developed to capture audiences at multiple touchpoints:

• Google Ads to efficiently capture high-intent users.
• Meta platforms to drive cost-effective reach through visual storytelling and audio-led messaging.
• Audio channels, including digital radio and Spotify, to engage audiences during key moments of attention.

While the campaign focused on maximising reach, its broader goal was to contribute to a long-term behavioural shift among travellers, supporting increased use of public transport for airport travel.

The Results

The campaign delivered impact at both scale and efficiency, successfully reaching audiences at key decision-making moments and driving measurable engagement. All four platforms (DAX, Google, Meta, and Spotify) met or exceeded key performance indicators (KPIs), driving broad awareness and engagement among our target audiences in key commuter regions.

• Across all channels, we served 9,794,816 impressions at a CPM of £2.38, against forecast impressions of 4.6M – 112% above target.
• Furthermore, we generated 76,808 clicks at a CTR of 0.78% and CPC of £0.30.
• Our Audio tactics delivered hundreds of thousands of impressions with near-perfect listen-through rates, significantly exceeding industry benchmarks. DAX alone served ~459k audio impressions with a 97.4% listen-through rate, surpassing the forecasted volume by ~19%. This indicates the audio creative resonated strongly, keeping listeners engaged to the end of each ad.

The integrated channel mix ensured that awareness, engagement, and action were all delivered efficiently, with audio building attention, social scaling reach, and Google converting interest into cost-effective traffic.

Overall, the campaign not only fulfilled its objectives but also offered valuable insights on creative effectiveness, audience behaviour, and cross-channel synergies.

Crucially, the campaign’s success extended beyond media performance. The total number of passengers travelling to Gatwick in 2025 increased year-on-year by 8.4%, representing over 50.5% of all travellers going to Gatwick using public transport.

Looking for a travel marketing agency?

Arke has been a trusted marketing agency for travel and tourism organisations for many years, with clients including London Gatwick, British Airways, GWR, Brighton Festival, Brighton’s i360 and many more. Our award-winning paid media, SEO, creative and digital strategy services are just a click away via the contact form below. Let’s have a chat and discuss your requirements.