More people than ever are using TikTok to consume and share travel content. This includes many other OTAs (online travel agencies) who have historically relied on inspiring destination content to built strong emotional connections with their audience.
With this in mind, Booking.com needed to set out a channel strategy that could successfully differentiate themselves, charting a course through the sea of sameness to win the hearts of travellers everywhere.
Whilst most of our competitors' content was focused on photogenic and inspirational travel experiences, we took heed of TikTok's role as a leading entertainment hub by opting to differentiate ourselves through culturally-relevant storytelling centred around the booking experience.
Inspired by niche TikTok communities, diverse creators and fast-moving platform trends, we celebrated the myriad of motivations behind booking a trip, aiming to prove that there's really no bad reason for travel. This creative platform of “Reasons To Book” was brought to life through Always On and Tentpole campaign moments throughout the year, assisted by an ensemble cast of mermaids, vampires, American footballers and even a cow called Bruce. Each piece of creative was tailored to TikTok by leveraging platform trends, audience insights and creator tools that are all native to the platform.
Our Always On was responsive to trending topics, with our team set up to monitor and react to opportunities with a unique and unpolished Booking.com POV in realtime. We then use targeted paid campaigns to amplify key or top-performing content. Reacting to the right trend at the right moment (however short-lived) momentarily enhanced our visibility and built momentum. As an example, our “Crawly the Gnome” trend video was turned around in less than 24 hours and was able to generate 2.4M engagements.
Our Tentpole campaigns promoted key brand moments and business initiatives such as Travel Proud and our Super Bowl sponsorship. A recent highlight has been our Genius Campaign designed to promote our loyalty program, featuring a series of well-known personas including Brooklyn Beckham. The content poked fun at their less-than-genius reputations as they experienced the perks of the Genius program to hilarious effect.
All content was edited and optimised to a unique style and tone that we found resonated best with our TikTok audience - pointed, playful and with thumb-stopping hooks. Implementation was topped off by making best use of platform features such as trending audio, creative templates and text to speech narration.
On TikTok in 2024 we:
Best performing video (23.5M views) - Genius tentpole content
Best reactive trend video (19M views) - Crawly the Gnome
"Reason to Book" Example - A Minion at Universal Orlando (18.5M views)
