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Travelport: “We launched a platform that makes planning, booking, and managing travel EASY”
5 minute read
An interview with the winners of the Best Multichannel Campaign
In December, Travelport received the Best Multichannel Campaign award for its 7 Wonders Challenge campaign. With this campaign, Travelport sought to put its modern retailing platform to the test by sending Jamie ‘Adventureman’ McDonald to visit the 7 Wonders of the World in 7 days using only public transport, in a GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS™ attempt.
To find out how they launched and promoted this campaign, we reached out to Travelport’s Acting Brand Marketing Manager, Rachel Cunningham. In an interview, she has now revealed what they did to create excitement and what other brands can learn from this campaign.
CONGRATULATIONS ON WINNING THE 2023 BEST MULTICHANNEL CAMPAIGN AWARD! COULD YOU PLEASE INTRODUCE TRAVELPORT AND THE 7 WONDERS CHALLENGE?
People love to travel but they hate the booking experience. It’s so complex. So many options, so many screens, so hard to make changes.
At Travelport, we’re on a mission to solve this. We launched a new platform, Travelport+, that makes planning, booking, and managing travel EASY for travel agencies and travellers.
We wanted to prove our ‘easier’ credentials and put our platform to the ultimate test. We sent adventurer, Jamie ‘Adventureman’ McDonald, on the most complex trip we could imagine – visiting the New 7 Wonders of the World in less than 7 days, only using public transport.
The entire trip itinerary was booked and managed by Travelbag, a travel agency using Travelport+. The trip involved travelling 22,000 miles, taking 13 planes, 16 taxis, 9 buses, 4 trains and 1 toboggan – at a time when travel was recovering from a global pandemic.
Armed with the latest travel tech tools from Travelport+, we wanted to see if Jamie could get to all wonders of the world in the most extreme scenario, setting a new Guinness World Record – and six days, sixteen hours and fourteen minutes later, we had our answer: yes!
WHAT CHANNELS DID YOU USE TO ANNOUNCE THE LAUNCH OF THIS CAMPAIGN AND CREATE EXCITEMENT?
To meet our objectives for the 7 Wonders Challenge campaign, we developed a fully integrated marketing and PR campaign.
Our Paid Media strategy for the campaign used LinkedIn, Facebook, X, GDN and Programmatic ads to drive traffic to the campaign hub which hosted a mix of video and animation, and information about the product behind the challenge. We predominantly used narrow targeting on LinkedIn, GDN and media spend in trade publications to reach targets.
Our organic social media strategy included posting content twice daily for the 6 weeks that the campaign was running, totalling 84 posts. We directed all content to our Hero Video and Campaign Hub.
We also created a bespoke organic strategy for Instagram which included reel content and was structured across the week focusing on product and core campaign messaging from Monday to Thursday and more entertaining content from Friday to Sunday.
Our PR strategy utilised the campaign as our main consumer PR driver, and through our work with Adventureman and Travelport’s Chief Marketing Officer, we were able to garner significant consumer press coverage through a satellite media tour.
Alongside these strategies, we also sent out campaign launch content to our entire email database and followed this up with tailored content to engaged and unengaged contacts. This allowed us to strengthen our market position and showcase that Travelport+ empowers the most complex trips.
HOW DID YOU PROMOTE YOUR HERO VIDEO?
Our hero video really was the most important asset of the 7 Wonders Campaign, detailing Adventureman’s mission against the clock to make it to all of the 7 Wonders in less than 7 days, but it also showcased our product Travelport+ and its ability to make the most complex trips simple, even in the face of the unforeseen challenges that often come with international travel.
Our strategy for promoting our Hero video was to continuously promote it through paid and organic social media multiple times throughout the course of the campaign, predominantly using YouTube advertising to encourage people to watch the full episode.
We also embedded the hero video on our 7 Wonders Hub to drive further traffic.
Alongside our Hero video, we created a series of secondary videos with behind-the-scenes footage, an introduction to Adventureman, and customer stories where they had solved complex traveller problems. These were also shared out on social media throughout the duration of the campaign.
WHAT LESSONS DID YOU LEARN DURING THIS CAMPAIGN, AND IS THERE ANYTHING YOU WOULD HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY?
Whilst our campaign was so successful and surpassed our expectations, with our hero video hitting over 1.5 million video views, for future campaigns of this size, we would look to potentially create more written and infographic content for campaigns; this would help us to be even clearer on the unique challenge that our platform is solving.
FINALLY, WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE TO BRANDS SEEKING TO LAUNCH A MULTICHANNEL CAMPAIGN THAT STANDS OUT IN 2024?
Our advice for brands seeking to launch a multichannel campaign that stands out in 2024 would firstly be to ensure that you have clear and tangible objectives from the outset, as well as a strong and clear narrative that aligns with your brand’s positioning.
It’s also incredibly important to ensure that your brand is consistent across all channels, be it video, social or written content as well as in your messaging and tone of voice.
We would also encourage brands to continuously test and monitor their performance at all stages of the campaign, having the flexibility to make changes and update strategies based on data and feedback.
