Executive Summary

The aim was to inspire travel through interesting local insight and beautiful photography and to

deliver this to consumers in an innovative and engaging way. Expedia and Metro produced tablet

city guides which significantly pushed the boundaries in terms of newsbrand tablet content. The

work demonstrates the creative possibilities of tablet advertising and showcases the significance of

this platform for both publishers and brands. The campaign was extremely well received and

Expedia.co.uk saw sales increases to specific destinations featured in the guides.

Background and Objectives

Expedia is one of the UK’s leading online travel agents, but 2012 saw it losing some of its spark with

its core, upmarket consumers with an observed decline in brand equity. This had been

predominantly driven by a strong price-led approach across the year. Although this promotional

strategy was successful at driving short term sales, it was at the expense of the longer term health of

the brand. As a result, we needed to re-connect with our core higher spending ABC1 audience, who

travel more frequently, as opposed to those just looking for a holiday bargain. Our insight focused on

two key elements:

We now live in a true holiday review culture, where extensive travel research is the norm. Travellers are now spending an average of 42 hours in the travel cycle; however, the majority of this time is spent outside the “booking” phase (nVision, 2013; Think Travel with Google, 2012).

Research from Expedia highlighted this further; showing that people were increasingly using their site as a travel search & comparison engine, but often went on to book elsewhere.

Subsequently we realised there was a huge opportunity to engage consumers and establish stronger

memory links and loyalty during the important ‘research and inspiration’ phase, rather than just

focusing on the latter booking stage.

Expedia has historically invested heavily in newsbrands, using National Press to drive sale and brand

messaging through display ads in the papers and on tablet. The role for newsbrands has always been

to raise awareness of Expedia in the travel market and ultimately to drive bookings.

We saw the potential to use some of the display budget to run a partnership and work with one

newsbrand to create content for Expedia’s core audience and considerers, and also to tap into some

of this time spent “travel researching.” Metro reaches over 3 million Urbanites daily through the

paper, over 60K on tablet and mobile devices and won Newspaper App of the Year in 2012.

Insight and Strategy

The challenge was to position Expedia as the inspiration behind travel and city breaks, rather than

just as the booking agent and to show innovation within the emerging tablet market. At the

Newsworks Tablet conference in 2012, Andrew Warner (Senior Marketing Director) revealed that

more than 10% of Expedia transactions now happened through a mobile device, and this has been

increasingly significant over the last year, which was an important piece of insight.

The tablet city guides are travel inspiration and “Through a Different Lens” was then born as a

concept for the guides. The content focused on uncovering hidden gems in the chosen destinations,

which were revealed by a city “host.”

Expedia decided which cities to push and put together incentivised deals to the dedicated

destinations, running in the same weeks as the guides published. Delete Digital Agency then built

and developed the content into city guides which were stored within Metro’s newsstand. It was the

collaboration between Expedia’s marketing team, Metro’s brand partnerships department, Delete

and PHD which ultimately made this partnership so successful.

The Plan

Expedia signed off four destination guides to run in January 2013. Monday is a significant day for

travel advertisers and January is a key month, so the guides published on every Monday of the

month. We ran a page advertorial covering off the destination in the paper and encouraging readers

to download the guide. Metro also pushed the campaign through social media and cobranded print

and tablet ads. Alongside this Expedia and Metro ran an online competition to win £500 Expedia

vouchers to help with the January blues!

The guides sat within Metro’s app as standalone specials. The opening page was an eye-catching

video of different shots from the destination. There was then an introduction from the host, which

led into “48 hours to explore….” Within this content was stunning photography, as well as links to

book certain hotels/experiences through Expedia. The map was interactive, allowing consumers to

plan itineraries around the city with a filter depending on whether you were interested in culture,

eating, nightlife or shopping. The final page linked through to the competition and to the exclusive

destination offers from Expedia.

The Metro partnership ran alongside a standard display campaign which ran across National Press.

Results

The overall objective of the guides was a branding exercise to inspire and educate consumers to

travel. This city guide campaign only ran with Metro – there was no other marketing push to drive

these destinations and yet we saw some fantastic results following the January campaign.

There were 25,525 competition entries to win a £500 Expedia Hotel voucher with 16K entries in the

first week, which was a great result. Through this Expedia collected data opt ins from over 4,500

people.

In total there were over 600,000 views of the guides and over 18,000 interactions with the map,

which had the longest dwell times. There were also over 200 social media shares about the

campaign.

Metro readers spent a total of 1,763 hours reading Expedia’s City Guides (that’s 10 weeks!)

The content was so well received that Metro received emails and phone calls from readers,

desperate to access the guide tablet content.

With these results, we planned phase two of the campaign and another eight guides with

destinations ranging from Ibiza to Las Vegas. We learned that the map was the most popular part of

the guides with consumers. We also saw an opportunity to increase reach by including mobile as

well, which added another 30K daily downloads. Finally we increased the advertorial page to a DPS

for better standout within the paper. This was designed by Delete and Metro together, to ensure

continuity in terms of the content. The second phase was also tweaked to fit in with Expedia’s

launch of “Travel Yourself Interesting.” Little-known facts about each destination were included

within all channels, to work with the display copy running in print, online and outdoor. “Travel

Yourself Interesting” is all about showcasing what makes real travel interesting and the guides

seamlessly fitted in with this messaging by giving consumers free, educative access to destinations

and reinforcing the inspirational and interesting association.

We are waiting on the results of Phase Two – we will have figures and the results of the research in

early November.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H87_kTuEPks&feature=youtu.be

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC0ynHLLGNo&feature=youtu.be

Client View

The results of our campaign illustrate the importance of newsbrands in influencing destination

selection and inspiring travel. By combining both traditional media and the iPad app, we are able

to reach a broad base of our target audience, whilst leveraging the diversity of newsbrand

platforms to bring these destinations to life. For Expedia delivering information and inspiration in

the way best suited to the different devices our customers are using at that specific moment in

time ensures we provide the level of service our customers expect in a rapidly evolving world. So,

it’s particularly important that our marketing efforts can flex to the needs of our audience too.

Expedia Guides Phase One (January 2013)

Expedia Guides Phase Two (July-November 2013)