Away is a travel lifestyle brand with a mission to transform travel through products and content that inspire people to get away more. Launched in 2016 as a purpose-driven organization, Away is rooted in the core belief that the more we all travel, the better we all become.
While travel is often revered as a positive thing, there is a large gap in accessibility to travel, which is why Away is committed to creating equitable access to travel for all. In order to unlock the life-changing experiences and powerful perspectives that international travel provides, Away partners with Global Glimpse, a nonprofit organization that facilitates travel experiences, leadership training, and provides tools & resources for High School youth from diverse backgrounds.
On Giving Tuesday (November 29, 2022), Away launched its General Travel campaign: a series of passport portraits and video interviews with the youth of Global Glimpse, all of whom have been provided access to travel with the help of the organization. Giving Tuesday is a global generosity movement unleashing the power of people and organizations to transform their communities and the world, making it the perfect time to promote Global Glimpse and its core mission, while shedding light on the inequity that exists in the travel industry.
The campaign served as a continuation of Away's partnership with Global Glimpse, with the overarching goal of increasing awareness of Global Glimpse and engagement with their work; all while amplifying students’ stories and perspectives as a testament to the immense power of travel.
Since 2020, Away has partnered with Global Glimpse and supported their mission through financial support, product donations, and employee volunteering. Additionally, Away also endowed Global Glimpse with a Passport Scholarship Fund to cover the cost of passports for students in financial need, given the high cost to acquire one. Throughout Away’s partnership with Global Glimpse, both partners have utilized their respective platforms to further Global Glimpse’s reach, visibility, and overall impact. The strategy behind Away’s Generation Travel campaign was targeted to the holiday season to amplify the organization’s work during a time where the spirit of giving is prevalent.
Photographed by world famous photographer, Martin Schoeller, the theme of the Generation Travel campaign centers around authenticity, focusing solely on the real students who faced barriers to travel, and sharing their genuine perspective on what it meant to each of them to have the opportunity to travel with Global Glimpse. In choosing this creative path, the campaign spotlights a new generation of diverse, empathic, and globally aware adventurers and leaders. The students were equally excited to bring this campaign to life—after sending the invitation to participate on a Thursday evening, every spot was filled (and a waitlist was growing) by the following Friday morning.
In ideating the campaign, both partners aligned on allowing the students to speak freely on their travels with Global Glimpse, and weren’t given any talking points or interview prep prior to the shoot. Instead, Schoeller and his team created an intimate and casual interview environment to share their hopes for the future, and the way their travels have impacted them. The result was a series of deeply personal, inspiring, and genuine stories and portraits, arranged in a creative visual style resembling passport photos.
Generation Travel debuted on Giving Tuesday in 2022, and ran through the holiday season. The campaign was amplified across Away’s owned and earned channels: assets and stories were promoted via emails; posts on Instagram, Linkedin, Facebook, and TikTok; a Retail installation; media outlets; and a paid ad spend.
Additionally, Away’s in-house team built a custom microsite for Generation Travel, which can be viewed here. This dynamic page showcases the hero video of the campaign as well as student portraits, individual student mini-films, and student quotes. The campaign and microsite also appeared throughout Away’s ecommerce site during the holiday season on the homepage, product pages, as well as Away’s Impact page. To ensure this storytelling remains available to Away’s community, the microsite is still live and navigable via an evergreen link in the footer of every awaytravel.com page.
Generation Travel was developed with the primary goal of raising national awareness for travel inequities, while helping Global Glimpse to achieve their goal to fundraise $130K in one month to support 2023 student travel scholarships.
The creative execution of the campaign allowed for both Away and Global Glimpse to leverage content showcasing the organizations’ incredible work together across owned, earned, and donated channels. Generation Travel was featured in a Sonos Radio ad spot, running throughout the month of November up until its debut on Giving Tuesday. Sonos Radio is home to over 60,000 radio stations, and reaches millions of households globally (Source: WIRED). Away also secured mass visibility on the Nasdaq billboard in Times Square on Giving Tuesday, which was revealed as a surprise to a group of featured students.
Since announcing the Generation Travel campaign, Global Glimpse has impactfully leveraged the content through thoughtful storytelling to reach their community of nearly 14 thousand students, parents, educators, partners, and supporters. The campaign’s national exposure has since resulted in hundreds of new active supporters, +285% increase in reach through social channels with a +167% increased engagement. Global Glimpse’s Instagram following grew by 9x just on November 29th alone, and the Generation Travel video was the highest performing post across all Global Glimpse’s social platforms.. Both Away and Global Glimpse are so proud to have shined a light on the positive way in which travel can affect people, and the lack of accessibility that many people face.
