Millennials, they love to travel, combine work and pleasure, and they seek the comfort of a hotel that suits all of their needs. The AccorHotels hotel group offers the rich hospitality experience they long for. However, AccorHotels' ten brands (in the Benelux) are not the first that come to mind when they search online. How can we engage the extremely social media-active millennial - with a 6-second attention span - into our hotel propositions? The answer lies in an attention-grabbing experience and an impactful narrative.
Insight
A hotel stay is both pleasurable and adventurous, sometimes even mysterious. Discovering new places, wandering into experiences. A hotel room that really suits your needs is a room you don't want to escape. We took this insight and transferred it to an interactive game on FB Messenger.
Find the Riddle Room
We created a mysterious room that people wanted to enter; in order to do so, they had to solve three riddles to reveal the Riddle Room's secret location. The right answer gave the chance to win a complete overnight stay in the actual Riddle Room; one of the 128 AccorHotels hotels in the Benelux. With this chatbot game, we transformed FB Messenger into a mysterious hotel room filled with riddles, putting logic and numeracy skills to the test.
We used the interactive and personal features of FB Messenger to connect our target audience with the ten AccorHotels' hotel brands that vary from budget to luxury. Every Riddle Room raised awareness for a hotel brand's proposition. For example, Sofitel Legend's iconic, self-indulging and luxurious hotel experience was scripted into each riddle. Even the chatbot humanised tone-of-voice reflected the personal hospitality offered by AccorHotels' hotel concierges.
A visually engaging experience
In 30 days, we opened 10 Riddle Rooms, each with 3 custom-made riddles written and designed to stimulate curiosity. To create a visually exciting experience that felt like a personal guided tour, we utilised FB Messenger's possibilities including gif animations, videos, photo carousels, audio files, emoji interactions and even 360° photos in the webview.
The storyline of each Riddle Room was linear, but the chatbot's responses, multiple hints and witty answers created a dynamic and entertaining chat flow. As a result, the Riddle Room was the first visually engaging FB Messenger game of its kind, combining the addictive nature of solving puzzles with a highly responsive chat and game flow.
We captured the attention of a hard-to-get-target and seduced them into a full experience of our hotel brand propositions: they spent an incredible average of 15 minutes in the Riddle Room.
Over the course of 30 days, ten Riddle Rooms captured the attention of our target audience. FB ads with teasing riddles drove them right into our chatbot game, resulting in these compelling statistics:
Awareness
The Facebook ads performed 67% above target, resulting in a 65.159 people that joined the chatbot game, 20.314 people played the game, a conversion of 31%.
Engagement
The players spent an amazing average of 15 minutes in the Riddle Room, instead of the average 6-second time span on Facebook. This is a total 351 days of engagement for a 30-day campaign. The game flow proved to be fluid and kept players into the game's narrative; 42.084 riddles were played and 42% finished a Riddle Room game and tried to guess the right hotel name.
