Expedia helps Indians 'Take A Vacation' by winning a free hotel stay!

The Vacation Deprivation Survey, which acted as the inspiration for the #VacationOnMyMind Twitter Campaign suggested that workaholic Indians are mostly deprived for holidays, placing India as the fourth most vacation deprived nation globally with 67% of Indians saying they feel very or somewhat vacation deprived. The survey also reveals that 64% of Indians who feel vacation deprived say their vacation deprivation stems from not getting enough vacation days, while 36% say their deprivation stems from not taking all of their vacation days. Indians are increasingly choosing to take multiple short vacations, than a longer one and disconnect with work.

To help Indians take a break and relax, Expedia came out with its #VacationOnMyMind. The objective was to help them utilize the Christmas – New Year long weekends in December. The campaign prompted the Indians to ’Take A Break by winning a free hotel stay from Expedia.  Multiple approaches were employed to engage with the fans including asking questions through pictures and placards than just text, challenging them for their love of travel, quizzing them on their knowledge of famous and not-so-common tourist destinations in India. To make it interesting, models were asked to hold placards with questions, where their attire served as clues in the pictures.

Twitter as a platform was used to host the contest as its audience is more evolved than other social media platform. Keywords related to travel and people who had showed interest in travel were exposed to the contest tweets. Apart from that, people with a large number of followers acted as influencers in their circle were also targeted through the promoted accounts. The participants were asked to tweet their answers using #VacationOnMyMind. Maximum participation was observed through mobile-users, followed by desktop users. The popular users of the contest hashtag (besides the brand) are the participants who are also the selected winners of the contest.

The campaign helped in generating a massive interest, engagement and traffic on Expedia Twitter page. We received over 834 replies, 439 re-tweets and 260 favorites. The hashtag #VacationOnMyMind received maximum reach and was tweeted 2,648 times during and after the contest. We witnessed participation from over 770 authors and generated 55,681 impressions organically in a span of 20 days reaching out to 1,496,849 Twitter profiles in the duration. The promoted account campaign got impressions of more than 2 lacs with a follower’s rate 1.21% while close to 2900 new followers were added.

The parameters used to identify the target were people who were interested in travel and people who act as influencers in their network and have large following.

Expedia tied up with various hospitality partners like The Lalit, Radisson etc. and gave Indians a chance to stay free of cost across various properties in cities like Goa, Kerala by participating in the contest. The idea gave 10 contest winners an opportunity to take a vacation while they saved money.