Art Series Hotels are a boutique luxury hotel chain. They needed a way to increase leisure traveller bookings during their recurring quieter summer period.

Research found that a major pain point of leisure travellers was the 11:00am checkout time (a global standard). But if no one was booked to check in to a departing guest’s room, why would they need to leave at 11:00?

The “Overstay Checkout”, a new to world checkout system based on hotel capacity was born. In essence, people would only have to check out, when the next guest booked into their room arrived.

The campaign was tremendously successful and applauded as a genuine product innovation, creating value for both the consumer and hotel, out of nothing. The consumer got the chance to stay on free, the hotel turned unused inventory into incentives to attract people to stay.

The solution was the Overstay Checkout. An idea that did away with the 11:00am checkout rule and allowed guests to stay on free until their room was needed for the next guest. Crucially, this meant that if no one was booked in for the next night, guests could stay another night free. And if no one was booked in for the night after that, they could stay again and again and theoretically never leave. The campaign was expected to exceed room night targets and create mass PR due to its innovative nature and stories of guests staying endlessly for free.

The promotion was a tremendous success, beating sales targets by 55%, generating $1.5m in PR and being heralded by PSFK, Fast Company and other influential titles as a genuine innovation in the hotel industry for solving the age-old issue of how to deal with unsold rooms. In particular, the response from guests ecstatic from staying two, three, or more extra free nights was the best the hotel had ever experienced recording an increase in positive online reviews on Facebook and travel sites of 400%.

Above all, our small $80,000 marketing budget created the impressive ROI of 359%.