As official travel partner of the New Orleans Jazz Festival we needed to tell people about the partnership, inspire people to travel, and enable them to have the best experience when they get there. We decided to throw a Jam as the festival afterparty to elevate peoples travel experiences and motivate people to become Expedia members for access. We needed to create a key peice of entertainment to launch the campaign, make ourselves a credible partner in the brand's first foray into the music category - and call people to action.

We see Anderson. Paak arrives in New Orleans with his drumsticks in his suitcase. He enters historic jazz venue Preservation hall and starts jamming with local musicians. This live recorded jam provides the sound bed whilst Anderson and the voices of local talent deliver a poetic love letter to the city, explaining a number of traditions such as second line funeral/wedding processions, Mardi Gras Indians, and draw the analogy of gumbo to explain the beauty of jazz, and New Orleans itself - all the different ingredients come together to make something beautiful. It should be chaos. But it's jazz.

Taking New Orleans as an example, tourism to the destination was actually in decline year-on-year. However, since we started marketing the destination through our Jazz Festival partnership last September, there’s been an almost 25% YoY (booking) growth. (Expedia Group internal data, Sept 2023-Feb 2024 compared to previous years since 2017)

In addition, we ran a marketing partner programme with 100 hotel partners who we drove traffic to from millions of Jazz Festival fans from around the US resulting in a 150% YoY uplift in Net Room Nights vs 34% from non-participating hotels. (Expedia Group internal data, Sept 2023-Feb 2024)