The Challenge

Create cultural relevance for hotels.com and keep the brand front of mind among key audiences during the COVID-19 pandemic - a time when no one could travel. 

The Approach

Hotels Room 101: a social-first campaign that went all-in on culture, content and conversation to connect globetrotters across the world.

Hotel Room 101 was a 10-hour conversation with the British public. Where most brands see their tweets live for seconds, our engagement-first approach to the campaign ensured you wouldn’t miss the conversation we started, whether you were tweeting over breakfast or scrolling away your afternoon.

The first content callout went out at 8am. UGC was the driving force of the nomination mechanic we employed, so we tweeted early and used paid Twitter ads to boost reach. 

This created an initial groundswell of conversation and early nominations, ready for the Manifest social team to like, reply and retweet in realtime.

As the comments continued, we built and continually updated a live campaign asset – a branded hotel room, filling with visual nominations.

Paid targeting optimised the campaign, adding new audience targeting based on live nominations. 

The Result

The campaign shot up the UK trends charts until #HotelRoom101 hit no. 1 spot, securing 172 pieces of top tier media coverage.