The summer months are peak mobile booking season in the US and UK with a significant proportion of accommodation bookings being made spontaneously at the last minute. Booking.com needed to capture this travel energy in the market, arming those who need accommodation within two weeks of stay with Booking.com mobile applications, and fostering a community of likeminded travellers.
As part of this project we created a host of assets that would inspire our audience to travel spontaneously with Booking.com, as well as educative assets that would demonstrate how exactly Booking.com tools would serve this behaviour. Beyond this, we wanted to champion those travellers who travelled on-demand with Booking.com, in order to foster brand loyalty and love. We needed travellers to feel like Booking.com not only made their travels frictionless, but also enriched them.
For this part of the project, we measured success through rate of engagement. If we could get travellers engaging with us positively in dialogue, we would foster a relationship that goes beyond transaction. And if we could get travellers willingly using our brand name in their social channels, this would infer that they were happy to be associated with us as a travel partner for spontaneous stays.
We needed to attract 25-39 year-olds across the UK and US who had a proven record of on-demand booking behaviour during the summer months, but who have likely booked historically directly with hotels or used other OTA sites or apps. This audience is constantly documenting their travels through messenger, pictures and social posts.
In order to discover what asset or experience would engage our audience in dialogue; we took a look at their existing travel behaviour on social media. We used Crimson Hexagon to see what hashtags were trending in summer, what type imagery was being shared, and what language frequented social posts. We observed that our travellers were celebrating their summer travel achievements with a bit of a competitive wink. They were acknowledging how well their travels had gone and wanted to share with the world. What if we acknowledged this subtle competitive behaviour, and acknowledged those that had really won summer, giving them an extra leg up in their social media game?
Throughout the summer period our communications rallied travellers to 'Wing Everything, Except Your Accommodation'. Towards the end of summer, once our travellers had answered the impromptu call, we then challenged them with the message 'Who Won Booking Summer?' calling on consumers to share their best summer picture through social channels and promoted posts.
Collaborating with digital artists Cari Vander Yacht, Chris Timmons, Justin Gammon and James Kerr, Booking.com created a series of GIFs to immortalize our travellers exemplifying the best of summer. This initiative acted as the grand finale to the integrated summer campaign for the brand, giving travellers the ultimate bragging rights asset.
•The #wingityeah social engagement drove over 2,500 photo entries within a 7-day period.
•During the #wingityeah social activation period 91 'summer winning' photos were turned into personalized GIFs and shared back with the owner via social media.
•#wingityeah social engagement observed 25,000 fan engagements, recruited 40,000 new, reached 6.4m unique people on Facebook alone and drove over half a million people to the summer campaign hub.
•The GIFs collectively received 16.4m views.
