CGN: 58% more ticket bookings in summer 2026 with CRM and paid media

CGN, a public transport and lake tourism operator, recorded 58% more ticket bookings and 37% more revenue from paid media over its peak season, June to August 2026, compared with the same period a year earlier. These results come from a setup deployed by Growth Room since March 2026, combining a CRM implementation, a rebuild of marketing, sales and customer service processes, and paid acquisition on Google Ads and Meta Ads.

About CGN

CGN operates in public transport and lake tourism. It sells crossings and cruises, to individual travellers as well as business customers. Its activity is therefore both B2C and B2B, with two different buying logics to serve from the same channels.

The business is seasonal. June to August concentrates most of the demand: a decisive share of bookings and revenue is decided over those three months. That concentration leaves little room for mid-season adjustment, and means tools and campaigns have to be in place before the summer starts.

The starting point

The technology environment was fragmented. Teams worked through manual processes, with spreadsheets and the same information entered several times over. That way of working weighed on team performance and on customer satisfaction: time spent re-entering data is time not spent handling requests. The objective was to structure and unify these processes in a CRM.

On the acquisition side, a large share of the 2025 media budget went to brand. That kind of investment captures demand that already exists but does not recruit new customers. The objective was to shift spend towards non-brand acquisition, in order to widen CGN's customer base.

CRM: unifying processes and data

CRM implementation and data migration

We implemented the CRM and migrated existing data into that single tool. The migration conditions everything else: as long as information lives in separate files, no process is genuinely shared between teams.

Rebuilding marketing, sales and customer service processes

Business processes were reworked and optimised across all three areas: marketing, sales and customer service. The aim was to remove duplicate data entry and let the same information travel from one team to the next, from first contact through to after-sales requests.

Crossing and cruise bookings

The purchase journey was brought into the setup: cruise and crossing bookings. Purchases now sit in the same environment as contacts and requests, which makes it possible to connect a booking to what preceded it. On a seasonal business, that link is what allows a peak period to be compared with the previous one on the same basis, rather than on totals pulled from separate files.

Google Ads and Meta Ads: shifting towards non-brand acquisition

We redeployed media budget from brand towards non-brand acquisition, on Google Ads and Meta Ads. The logic is straightforward: brand campaigns speak to people who already know CGN, while non-brand goes after travellers who do not yet have the offer in mind.

That shift showed its effect on the 2026 high season: 58% more ticket bookings and 37% more revenue recorded on paid media between June and August, compared with the same period a year earlier.

A visual and video strategy for the campaigns

Non-brand acquisition means explaining an offer to audiences who do not know it. We deployed a dedicated visual and video strategy for the campaigns, built for that audience rather than carried over from brand communication. The same approach covers both sides of the business, individual travellers and professional customers.

Results

• 58% more ticket bookings over the peak season, June to August 2026, versus the same period the previous year.
• 37% more revenue recorded on paid media over that same June to August 2026 period, year on year.

The engagement has been running since March 2026. The approach stays the same: unified data in the CRM, processes shared across marketing, sales and customer service, and a media budget weighted towards recruiting new customers.

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