Shut borders. Grounded planes. Lockdowns. The less said, the better. Everyone knows the travel industry took a bad hit. At the height of it, no one could travel, or even think of travel, let alone bother with Hotels.com when the world was crashing and burning around them. A run-of-the-mill campaign was out of question. We stood no chance to be on people's minds. But here’s the problem: if people didn't think of us then, chances are they wouldn’t when travel resumes.

Introducing Eau de Holiday—a very on-the-nose home perfume collection by Hotels.com that captured curious Korean travel memories in a specific place at a specific time. We parodied the pretentiousness of designer-style campaigns by using equally pretentious labels on our perfumes: the mythical fragrance of Gyeongju’s ancient lands; vintage bookstores snuggled by the alleys of hidden Seoul; the seductive whiff of sweet potatoes roasting over Gangwon campfires; and the liquid poetry of fresh sea salt clam soup from the island of the Gods. Utterly cringey, yet irresistible.

Fighting for people’s attention was already hard enough pre-pandemic. And now they were stuck at home. To make them think of us, we needed to find a way not just into their heads, but into their homes. As outlandish as it sounds, Hotels.com had to be the first and the last thing they think about every day, wherever they were holed up in. We had one powerful tool in our armour to do just that – people’s sense of smell. Smells evoke emotions, influence moods, and have you re-living memories with just a whiff. Smell has the power to transport us to a time and fantastically for us, place. We wanted people to dream of holidays—on repeat—even when they shouldn’t. So the timing couldn’t have been more perfect to do the extraordinary—get to people’s heads through their noses.

We did what any designer perfume brand worth its salt would do—a commercial that was all style but made no sense. The commercial was a parody, with what was supposedly a profound take on travel. We released the video on our socials and on the same day, we sent the collection to the media and influencers. They filmed unboxing videos on their own and shared it on their social platforms. Perfumers did reviews of the collection. We also shared Instagram Stories on the inspiration behind each perfume, complete with over-the-top descriptions that were both hilarious and tongue-in-cheek—all in the name of parody. We asked our fans to tell us what they thought should be the fifth perfume in the collection and gave the boxsets to ideas that are as absurd as our original four. Plans are now underway to create the fifth perfume that fuses all the winning ideas.

So good was the demand that people almost forgot about their hotel refunds for a while, with Hotels.com social pages replete with enquiries on how to purchase the collection instead. Eau de Holiday landed Hotels.com one of its best performing campaigns to date. With a shoe-string budget, the campaign got us +60 million impressions, +6 million video views, +60 Korean news coverage, +20 increase in engagement on social media, 98% increase in news fans on Instagram and +1000 user generated content. As impressive as these numbers are, nothing felt better than snatching the holy grail—people started booking with us in droves, as soon as they sniffed that the travel restrictions were going to be lifted. Now that’s a win.