Amid travel limitations caused by worldwide border closures and lockdowns, Booking.com briefed a brand campaign to:

+ Maintain its profile amidst a climate where few bookings were being made, across the brand’s key Asian markets: Australia, India, Japan, Korea, Vietnam

+ Leverage its position as a travel industry leader to inspire and reignite the desire for travel and exploration, in preparation for future travel bookings

Underpinning the brand challenge was the evolving COVID-19 situation, with border reopenings and sandboxes marred by travel hesitancy and rising Delta infection rates across priority markets.

With all this in mind, the agency conceptualised the Booking Explorers PR campaign, with the objectives of:

+ Driving brand awareness and recall, in preparation for the journey to borders reopening

+ Engaging consumers digitally, for remarketing when outbound travel became possible

+ Showcasing Booking.com’s understanding of travel as a fundamental need, and its ability to make travel easy

The campaign set out to inspire the transformational impact of travel through the eyes of five travel influencers across the APAC region – leaders, trailblazers and experts in their own fields – with compelling stories of how they preserved the spirit of exploration despite the restrictions of the pandemic.

By co-creating stories with influencers and articulating them through an owned, earned and social media campaign, Booking Explorers would share equal billing with travel-hungry consumers’ friends and family in their social feeds, with the intention of resonating on a personal and emotional level. The nature of travel stories also meant that the campaign’s influencer content had the potential to engage audiences across the region, and not just in their origin countries.

This would inspire and excite wanderlust: connecting meaningfully with consumers in a way that acknowledged the ongoing uncertainty of the situation, remaining grounded in the realities of life under COVID-19.

At the end of 2020, Booking.com surveyed 20,000 travellers globally and uncovered key predictions for the future of travel across the world in 2021 and beyond. Over 60% were excited about the possibility to travel again, and appreciated travel more than they did pre-pandemic. While most travellers would not be comfortable travelling until a COVID-19 vaccine/treatment was fully implemented, their appetite for consuming travel content continued to grow: 95% of audiences had spent time looking for vacation inspiration.

With the key message of Keeping the Spirit of Travel Alive, the campaign incorporated the channels through which would-be travellers engage with travel content. Informed by media consumption trends, the omnichannel strategy took into account: earned media outreach to relevant travel and lifestyle editorial publications, video content, a content hub for use across the earned, owned and social media ecosystem, and opportunities for on-ground and virtual engagement with the five influencers.

The agency worked with Booking.com to execute through a modified hub-and-spoke model. The development of overall campaign messages, content assets, web development and other intensive production aspects was managed centrally from Singapore. The influencer filming and interviews were managed locally, requiring creative production efforts amid frequently changing COVID-19 limitations.

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Explorers began with the soft-launch of the Booking Explorers microsite (bookingexplorers.com) and official trailer, alongside a first wave of regional media announcements. This was followed by a bi-weekly cadence of launching the campaign in each Explorer market: the release of each Explorer’s microsite page and editorial story, with a media announcement and push for exclusive interviews. With each content launch, the corresponding country team drove campaign momentum by: pitching to earned media in travel and lifestyle verticals, managing interview opportunities with the Explorers, and ensuring all content was amplified on relevant local social channels.

Throughout the campaign period, domestic and international travel avenues had begun reopening within the target audience geographies. This campaign proved successful in associating Booking.com with this increased interest and appetite for travel.

The nine social posts by the five influencers garnered over 1.4 million organic impressions, with an additional 300,000 organic impressions from six Instagram Stories. The campaign was also featured 130 times in prominent lifestyle and travel publications. The bookingexplorers.com microsite saw the most inbound traffic from India and Vietnam – two of the brand’s priority markets – during the campaign period.

During the campaign month, daily search queries on Booking.com from Australia, India, Japan and Vietnam increased by up to 44% from the previous month. Booking.com also remained at the top of mind in the month after, when the volume of search queries from these countries went up between 25% to 80% from the pre-campaign period. These were a clear indicator that the Explorers campaign had hit its mark, driving awareness and recall for the brand during a crucial time period for the travel industry.

The success of this campaign has inspired a follow-up effort to be launched later in 2022, which will be refined to accounting for the evolving state of the pandemic. Explorers 2.0 will also further optimise for engaging users in Korea, where the search volume on Booking.com remained flat before, during and after the campaign period.