Across the travel industry, the winter season traditionally sees slower visitation. This led to our primary business objective: to increase Motel 6 revenue and direct bookings during the winter season.
But despite Motel 6’s budget-conscious guests having less disposable income, we uncovered a surprising data point about their winter travel interests: they’re 5x more likely than the general population to be interested in skiing - a sport infamous for being expensive, from gear to lodging to lift tickets.
While Economy Lodgers crave the mountains during the winter months, most have been priced off the slopes. And historically, this diverse audience isn’t represented on the mountain with just 12.5% of skiers who identified as diverse during the 2020/2021 season.
This inspired our idea to position Motel 6 as the brand that champions “Ski for All”, making the mountains more accessible for everyone to enjoy. This led to our secondary objective and goal to do good: to increase access to ski slopes amongst low income, underrepresented groups.
To bring our “Ski for All” mission to life and make winter sports more accessible, we teamed up with a few key partners:
Share Winter Foundation: An organization that empowers a diverse community of youths to ski. Motel 6 sponsored a winter full of ski trips for kids who otherwise wouldn’t have had the opportunity and showed the nation that everyone deserves ways to make skiing accessible.
IndyPass: A collection of independent resorts that believe the larger mountains have made skiing unaffordable. The partnership offered My6 members 10% off season passes, and existing IndyPass holders 10% off their Motel 6 stay.
Joe Miron: A longtime Motel 6 guest and legendary ski bum. Joe’s been skiing on a budget for 50+ years, making Motel 6 his go-to mountain lodge and averaging no less than 35+ resorts each season. Joe is living proof that no mountain is out of range, or budget, if you stay at Motel 6.
In addition to sharing press releases highlighting each of the partnerships, we shared various stories about these powerful partnerships across our social channels.
The Ski For All campaign earned extensive national reach, receiving 174MM earned impressions across 2,600+ placements - including a feature in Ebony Magazine (a publication with the goal of shining a light on the Black community) and an NBC broadcast Olympic Zone segment during the 2022 Winter Games — paving the way for a more diverse future of skiing, and showing that no mountain is out of reach with the help of Motel 6.
The social messaging was positively received with a 9.6% organic engagement rate on Instagram (30% higher than benchmark), proving that taking direct action to make the slopes more accessible resonates with our audience.
Additionally, the campaign drove revenue +20% YoY for ski resort-adjacent Motel 6 properties contributing to a +15% in overall business revenue YoY. And we saw a +52% in the all-important direct website bookings (2000 bps above chain) for ski resort-adjacent properties, contributing to a +36% in direct bookings YoY for the business overall.
