Sar-El Adventures

Overview

Sar-El Tours is one of Israel's most established tourism operators — 30 years of experience, over 1.25 million travelers served. But their offering was built for an audience that was aging out. The millennial travel market was worth $203 billion in 2018, with an average annual travel budget of $4,400 per person and 40% choosing international destinations — and Sar-El had no product designed to capture any of it.

We were running Sar-El Creative — the in-house creative agency operating within Sar-El Tours. We saw the gap, researched it, and built the business case from scratch. What came out of that work was Sar-El Adventures: a brand-new product line designed for immersive, adventure-forward, mission-aligned travel in Israel — built specifically for younger audiences who wanted to feel the land, not see it from a bus.

We built the brand from the ground up: the name, the brand book, the positioning strategy, the initial concept, and the copy. Sar-El Creative handed them a complete creative foundation. The product launched on it.

The Challenge

Traditional Israel tours weren't losing younger audiences by accident. The format — structured itineraries, bus-based travel, passive sightseeing — was designed for a generation with different expectations. The research was clear: millennials were traveling internationally, spending meaningfully, and choosing experiences over itineraries. Day trips, food tours, adventure formats — that's what the market was moving toward. Nothing in Sar-El Tours' catalog addressed it.

The challenge wasn't just designing a new trip format. It was defining what the product was, who it was for, what made it different from both tourism and missions travel, and how to build a brand around it that could stand on its own — without diluting the Sar-El Tours identity it was growing out of.

Our Approach

Working from within the team, we drove the strategy and execution of a brand-new product concept:

• Market Research & Gap Analysis — Mapped the millennial travel market — $203 billion in 2018, with a $4,400 average annual travel budget and 40% international travel participation — and identified the specific disconnect between what that audience wanted from Israel engagement and what was being offered. Positioned the opportunity as a niche market play: not competing with mass tourism, but owning the immersive, adventure-forward segment nobody had built for Israel yet. Built the internal business case that moved this from observation to funded initiative.
• Product Concept Development — Defined the product architecture: what Sar-El Adventures was, how it differed from leisure tourism and traditional missions work, and how it would create deeper, longer-lasting connection to Israel through active engagement.
• Naming — Created the Sar-El Adventures name — positioned as a natural extension of the Sar-El Tours family while signaling something distinctly different in tone and target audience.
• Brand Book — Built the complete brand system: visual identity guidelines, tone of voice, messaging framework, and positioning principles that gave the product a foundation to build from.
• Concept & Copy — Drafted the initial positioning copy and narrative that established the brand voice — adventurous, spiritually grounded, and written for people who want Israel to change them, not just impress them.
• Pilot Experience Framework — Built the structure for the first trips, integrating teaching, exploration, and cause-based encounters into a coherent journey format aligned with Sar-El Tours' broader mission.

Though we’ve since moved on, the impact continues:

• Sar-El Adventures is live and operating at sareladventures.com — with a full catalog of adventures and experiences built on the product concept and brand foundation developed by Sar-El Creative.
• The product is serving notable clients — including groups from Trinity Broadcasting Network, one of the world's largest Christian media organizations, and established travel partners like Uncharted Adventures.
• The market case held. The gap we identified in the research was real — and Sar-El Tours committed to a full product line, a standalone brand, and ongoing operations to fill it.
• The brand foundation we built is still the one the product runs on — the name, the positioning, and the voice developed here are what Sar-El Adventures launched with. Sar-El Creative was an in-house agency we built and ran within Sar-El Tours. This engagement represents that body of work.