A travel company has managed to stir up a lot of viral traffic with their hashtag. Watch and learn, people.
By MediaStreet Staff Writers
What do a dream wedding in New York, an adventure through the mountains of Sri Lanka and a family’s search for their roots in Scotland all have in common? All saw a hospitality professional going out of their way to make or save someone’s trip. And a holiday booking company use this mushy sequence of events with a hashtag to fire up social media views and get a great repsonse from them.
Booking.com call themselves the global leader in connecting travellers with the widest choice of incredible places to stay. Established in 1996 in Amsterdam, Booking.com B.V. has grown from a small Dutch start-up to one of the largest travel e-commerce companies in the world. Part of The Priceline Group (NASDAQ: BKNG), Booking.com now employs more than 17,000 employees in 198 offices in 70 countries worldwide.
So, what are they doing with their social media marketing? They are riding hastags like a showjumper would a prize horse.
They have had some great success with their recent hashtag #BookingHero. They asked people to share their travel stories using the hashtag. The best story won travel prizes and big kudos online.
Following thousands of submissions via social media, Booking.com selected the three most touching and inspiring accounts of hospitality professionals going above and beyond to create unique and unforgettable travel experiences for their guests.
The customers were then flown back to say thank you to the person who saved their trips. Here are the stories.
The point isn’t the stories though. The point is that real people’s journeys made the hashtag come alive and generate traffic for booking.com. In fact, the call out for submissions via social media has been so successsful that Booking.com is now using the hashtag to extend the social media campaign with long-form video content that extends the #BookingHero message, with TV to follow.
According to recent research conducted by Booking.com across 25 markets in 2017, a personal connection is essential for many travellers with 29% saying that an accommodation feeling like home is key and 24% sharing that a welcoming host is a make or break factor during the first 24 hours of their trip.
Said Pepijn Rijvers, Chief Marketing Officer, Booking.com. “These stories beautifully demonstrate that an amazing trip is about more than simply finding the right destination or the perfect accommodation– it’s also about the people you meet along the way which truly make for an unforgettable journey. And that’s what travel is all about.”
And for the company, it is about finding the right hashtag and getting it to go viral.
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