In 2009, Expedia, the main company on online travelling, arrived in Brazil installing its headquarter for Latin America in São Paulo. The company launched the brand Hoteis.com (www.hoteis.com), the world largest online hotel booking website.

In the awakening of the brand, the first campaign focused on the Brazilian consumers tackled the culture of buying travel packages through intermediaries like travel agencies.

In order to challenge this culture, the campaign was developed exploring the Independent Traveler concept. The cornerstone to do it was a webserie comparing two trips. One trip was done by Ricardo Freire, a well known Brazilian blogger/ author/ columnist specialized in tourism, to be the Independent Traveler. In the challenge, Ricardo Freire must travel booking through Hoteis.com and find the great opportunities the website provides, while a friend of his must travel through the usual travel package.

In a fun, simple and visual way, Hoteis.com through its webseries proves that the current Brazilian culture of traveling isn’t the best way to go. It challenges giving a great solution to it.

In October 2nd, 2009 there was the campaign kick off with a press conference with journalists from segments such as travel, business, advertising and marketing and consumer behavior.

Short after that it was launched hoteis.com’s twitter, facebook and channel at You Tube. Also seeding in blogs and communities to bust the audience of the webseries and start to build a sene of community over the “independent travelling” subject.We also launched a contest called “Your Trip Back to You” to motivate internet users to send video of frustated Trips. The winner of this competition would win a trip to New York so that his/her frustrated trip would be compensated by a Hoteis.com’s award!Each week a new episode of the webseries was launched supported byt new PR and web seeding efforts. There was also a integration with media since the videos were broadcasted in the home page of Brazillian main portals.

300 % y.o.y. growth in bookings.Over 660,000 views of the websodes and contest videos.Return in media coverage was equivalent to the entire webserie costs.