Route Cuba is an agency specializing in Cuba.
Their expertise lies in organizing tailor-made, à la carte trips, and they also offer 4 tours, from 2 to 10 people maximum, with different lengths of stay.
Competitors specializing in Cuba on the French market are numerous.
Route Cuba’s digital strategy must therefore stand out from the crowd.
SEO optimization of the website, as well as digital notoriety on social networks, represent a real differentiation tool.
Let’s meet Yeny Abreu Martínez, founder of Route Cuba, who answers our questions.

▪ Can you introduce yourself and tell us more about the creation of Route Cuba?

Route Cuba is, above all, a small team of young, dynamic and professional Cuban enthusiasts, 100% Cuban!
We’re a French travel agency (registered in France), but our core business is organizing tailor-made trips for small groups (between 2 and 10 participants) to Cuba, the destination we specialize in.

Open to sharing our knowledge and expertise with all those who, like us, would like to discover our country in an authentic way, our work is based on our core values: putting forward our expertise as local professionals and our freedom and autonomy of production, to co-create with our travelers personalized journeys, privileging direct contact with the local population, and combining the must-sees of the destination with off-the-beaten-track experiences, ensuring the total quality of our service.
It’s a very different concept from the traditional travel agencies and tour operators that offer Cuba, because we offer our travelers the chance to discover Cuba with Cubans!

More than 850 travelers have already placed their trust in us since our creation in 2018 (both B2C and B2B), and more than 98% of them have returned delighted with their trips, handcrafted with our local partners, carefully selected and fully adapted to their travel habits, budget, desires and mood.

▪ What have you done to stand out from your competitors?

There are many competitors in the French market, and in French-speaking markets in general, offering Cuba as a destination.
Our strategy is to set ourselves apart from the competition, always emphasizing our core values, which are also our main strengths:

• Our expertise as local professionals.
  All the members of our team are not only Cubans, but professionals with academic training and many years’ professional experience in incoming tourism (incoming travel agencies, tour guides, sales representatives, etc.).
  So we all know our country like the back of our hand, which is a considerable advantage.
• Our freedom and autonomy of production.
  As an independent agency with all the necessary tools, as well as numerous contacts with local service providers selected by ourselves, we are able to freely create and propose trips ranging from the more or less classic to the more unusual.
  This freedom and autonomy of production comes from the fact that we have no imperatives or obligations to sell certain products (catalogs, etc.), but rather to be entirely independent, both with regard to our partners and our customers.
• Contact is always as direct and transparent as possible, between our three pillars: our customers, our local service providers and our agents.
  Not only does this enable us to offer the best prices to our customers, since there are no intermediaries between our agents and our local service providers, it also allows our travellers to meet the local population, one of Cuba’s main assets.
• Our travel offer is a mix of the classic and the unusual, combining the must-sees of the destination with more or less original, off-the-beaten-track experiences, always in co-creation with our travelers and therefore entirely tailor-made.
  What’s more, by offering tailor-made trips or small groups of no more than 10 participants, we are able to personalize even the smallest of groups, while respecting and preserving the destination and its values (nature, culture, population, etc.) in a responsible manner.
• The total quality of our service.
  For us, every stage of a trip is equally important, from the moment we make contact with our travellers following an initial inquiry, right through to their return, or even afterwards.
  We therefore pay particular attention to the exchanges with our customers, to create an atmosphere of trust and transparency, and to ensure follow-up throughout the trip.
  Then, once the traveler’s expectations have been clearly defined, we select the services and providers best suited to each customer’s needs and wishes.
  Finally, our ongoing, friendly support ensures that we accompany all our customers through every stage of their trip, even after their return.

▪ What are your goals for your digital strategy?

Route Cuba is a fairly new agency, and (at least initially) is only present on the Internet.
This doesn’t prevent us from meeting our customers over a coffee, for example… However, it does mean that we attach paramount importance to our Internet strategy and digital marketing communications.
Beyond simply having a website and a presence on social networks, our primary objective is to exploit the full potential of our brand identity, so that we can ..:

• increase Internet visibility and brand awareness;
• attract and engage our target market segments;
• increase the number of conversions on our website and generate quality leads and prospects for our business;
• convert our visitors into travel requests and, eventually, into actual trips.

To sum up, our current objectives for our digital strategy include raising our profile in the French-speaking market and creating a community of Cuba enthusiasts loyal to our travel concept, capable of becoming our future customers.

▪ How is SEO content writing organized for your website?

In collaboration with Travel Insight, SEO content writing is organized on the basis of two articles per month, which are published both on our website and on our social networks.
The topics are diverse and defined together, between Route Cuba and Travel Insight, but they mainly concern the particularities of Cuba as a tourist destination.
The articles are written by the Travel Insight team, by Marie FIENG who is our project manager, and we review them at Route Cuba for validation.
Then, after making the necessary corrections, they are published.

▪ How do you measure the impact of your website?

Our digital travel strategy, and social media in particular, has been defined by fairly clear objectives from the outset of our collaboration, the first and most general of which is to make ourselves known and convert our audience into our travelers.
As such, several elements are taken into account to measure the impact of our website, such as: the number of unique visitors (country of residence, age, etc.); the source of the traffic; the number of pages viewed by the visitor; the bounce rate; the engagement of our community (reactions to publications, etc.); the average time spent per page; the position of our website on search engines, principally Google.

▪ Today, Travel Insight is helping you with your social media communications and website SEO optimization.
What’s in it for you?

Above all, our collaboration with Travel Insight provides us with personalized, dedicated support for Route Cuba, from the definition of the overall strategy and objectives, right through to the implementation of the various actions agreed.
This guarantees that we’ll be working with experts in the field, capable of : identify our specific needs and adapt the strategy to be implemented accordingly; define the objectives to be achieved and personalize them, according to Route Cuba’s particular expectations; provide content adapted to Route Cuba’s concept and the targeted market segment, both for our social networks and our website; maintain close and transparent communication, in complete confidence, to agree together on the various actions to be implemented, adapting them according to the circumstances of the moment; attract and maintain a community around our agency and our travel concept… For us at Route Cuba, being supported today by Travel Insight means being able to entrust our
digital communications strategy to professionals, ensuring us an effective and efficient web presence, which is particularly important in these times.