Impact Travel Group
Unifying a group brand behind a powerful commitment
Background
Impact Travel Group is a portfolio of brands that have deep heritage and strong reputations in their own right. From school expeditions and gap years to internships and specialist travel, the group spans a broad range of experiences, life stages and motivations.
But this breadth also makes the story harder to tell. Each brand has its own emotional world, but the group-level narrative was less clear. In trying to hold together brand plurality, Impact Travel Group risked losing the thing that made it powerful: the passion, rigour and long-term commitment behind the work.
Our task was to create a unifying group-level brand strategy and identity that explains why Impact Travel Group exists, who it is for, and how each brand belongs in the family.
How we got there
We began by looking for the common thread across the portfolio. On the surface, the brands appear to serve different people: young travellers, schools, universities, career switchers and specialist interest travellers.
But we found a powerful truth in something simple. The brand name. Across all of its brands, Impact Travel Group creates two kinds of impact: impact on the world, and impact on the person taking part. These are experiences that ask people to show up, contribute, learn and be changed by what they do.
(Figures for illustrative purposes only.)
Defining our positioning
This thinking led to a clearer group positioning: Impact Travel Group creates life-defining experiences with real consequence.
It captured both sides of the offer. The personal transformation travellers feel, and the real-world responsibility required to make those experiences meaningful. The strapline, Journeys that go further, carried that same double meaning – and worked also in a shorter form, Go further, as a direct call to action to travellers, partners and brands.
The positioning was supported by three values: earned trust, uncompromising integrity and long-term commitment. Together, they gave the brand a clear, credible foundation for uniting the group and expressing its role.
Visual identity
The visual identity is designed to feel warm, grounded and consequential – more human than institutional, but with enough authority to carry a group-level brand. The colour palette draws from landscapes in Impact Travel Group’s destinations, using the hues of mahogany, sand and earth as a rich foundation, with pops of rainforest, clay and lime to add depth, energy and contrast.
The imagery is led by the causes outlined in the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Rather than relying on generic travel beauty shots, the brand shows change in both macro and micro ways – from bird’s-eye views that capture scale to close-up moments of action. The device where a person reaches beyond the edge of the frame brings the idea of Go further to life visually. This makes the identity feel active, honest and rooted in evidence.
Brand system
The design system is built around the idea of a window to the world. Rounded graphic frames come together to form a bigger picture, reflecting the diversity of Impact Travel Group’s brands, destinations and impact areas. This gives the identity a flexible device that can hold both the personal and the global: the individual moment and the wider consequence.
The result is a group brand with real stretch. A strategy and identity that unite a complex portfolio, sharpens Impact Travel Group’s role in the market, and gives its brands a stronger shared foundation.
