March 29, 2024

Advertising: Hilton Site Prescribes Vacations for Workers’ Ills

Onion Labs, the creative services arm of the publishing company, has helped Hilton Hotels and Resorts create a Web site, vacationcarecenter.hilton.com, that lets users diagnose their vacation needs and receive customized prescriptions for visits to Hilton hotels to cure what ails them.

Onion Labs has created cartoons that represent humorous ailments that afflict workers in need of a vacation. They are featured on the new site and have been designed to be shared by social media.

More than a third of the business of Hilton Hotels and Resorts is generated by leisure travelers, and the new campaign is directed at them, said Andrew Flack, vice president for global brand marketing.

“We are particularly targeting working professionals,” Mr. Flack said. “It’s becoming harder and harder to switch off work, harder for people to think about and plan vacations. This time of year is popular for people to plan vacation travel. When they come through Christmas, they think ahead for the year, think about where they might go.”

To that end, the Web site, called the “Hilton Urgent Vacation Care Center,” asks visitors to take a quiz to receive their “vacation diagnosis.” Visitors are asked when they last took a vacation and how long it was; during which activities, such as a child’s birth or a first date, they check their office e-mail; how long their commute is; and which activity they “look forward to most if/when” they take a vacation. They are also asked for their home and e-mail addresses.

The site also urges visitors to “stop vacationitis before it spreads,” and to view and share the disease’s 14 symptoms, illustrated by Onion Labs’ cartoons. These symptoms include “acute cancelitis,” “commuteritis,” “cubiclophobia” and “yellow Post-it fever.”

The customized remedies the site prescribes for visitors are vacations of different lengths and types, determined by the severity of one’s “vacationitis.” The site might recommend a weekend getaway near home, or a longer vacation at a destination farther away; all recommendations include links to Hilton Hotels and Resorts’ online booking form.

The site, which is being introduced Monday, also features a contest, running through Feb. 28, that will offer 15 weekend getaways as prizes. Through this year, 550 of Hilton Hotels and Resorts’ locations are participating in a sale, called “Any Weekend, Anywhere,” with discounts of up to 40 percent on weekend stays.

The site also contains a “global vacation alert level,” a real-time, interactive map that shows differing levels of need for vacations in respondents’ home countries, as well as vacation research by Hilton, dating from 1989 to 2013. For example, a new survey among 2,000 workers in Britain found they spent only one third of their average, annual 24 days of leave time on vacation because they had to spend the rest on “domestic admin.”

Mr. Flack said the site, with content in English, Spanish, Portuguese and many other languages, is meant primarily for prospective travelers in North and South America and Britain.

He said that when Hilton “decided to take a humorous approach, we got only so far ourselves.”

“We approached The Onion,” he said. “They’re experts at making fun of life. And they have their own audience they can share the site with, an attractive demographic 18 to 45, at the younger end of the Hilton demographic. It’s an audience of up-and-coming travelers and an attractive audience for us.”

Grant Jones, director of marketing for The Onion and a partner in Onion Labs, said The Onion had 4.5 million Twitter followers and 2.2 million Facebook fans, to whom the new Hilton Web site will be promoted. Established last year, Onion Labs has included Microsoft, Dodge and 7-Eleven among its clients.

The new Hilton site also will be featured on the in-room television channel in the brand’s hotels, and in brief Hilton ads on Facebook and Twitter.

Mr. Flack said Hilton Hotels and Resorts would spend more than $10 million on advertising, public relations, social media and other marketing activities in the United States this year to attract leisure travelers. According to Kantar Media, Hilton Hotels and Resorts spent $19.4 million to $50.1 million on advertising annually in all media from 2008 through 2011, and it spent $36.6 million, including $2.3 million on online advertising, in the first nine months of last year.

The new campaign received mixed reviews from travel and marketing specialists.

Henry Harteveldt, an analyst for Hudson Crossing, a travel consulting company, said Hilton’s vacationitis concept was “not very original.” He said, “Expedia does an annual study on how vacation-deprived Americans are.”

The vacationitis symptoms created by Onion Labs are “absurd,” he said. “There are still a lot of people out there who don’t have jobs or are underemployed; they might be very glad to have these problems,” he said. “The approach they’ve taken seems sophomoric.”

Paul Valerio, a San Francisco-based principal of Method, a brand and design consulting company, also said the vacationitis concept “taps into something that’s been seen before.” But he called Hilton’s use of Onion Labs “unexpected, in a positive way, coming from a brand that’s been around that long.”

Irma Zandl, a New York-based brand consultant, said the campaign felt “on-trend with how people are stressed.”

“The collaboration with The Onion is excellent; it differentiates Hilton in a key, positive way,” she said. “You don’t see anybody else doing this.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/business/media/hilton-site-prescribes-vacations-for-workers-ills.html?partner=rss&emc=rss