The Marketer’s

Guide to Travel
Content

by Aaron Taube

Copyright © 2016 Contently. All rights reserved. contently.com

Table of 2

Contents

I. Introduction 3

II. Best Practices: Content Creation 4

III. Best Practices: Distribution 7

IV. B
 est Practices: Measurement and 10
Optimization

V. Emerging Trends: Virtual Reality 13

VI. Emerging Trends: Locally Sourced Content 14

VII: Emerging Trends: Print 15

VIII: Emerging Trends: Personalization 16

IX. Conclusion 17

The Marketer’s Guide to Travel Content

I. 3

Introduction
Five years ago, if you wanted to travel to Thailand, you’d probably start with a Google
search and a quick glance at a site like TripAdvisor. Today, however, the process of
researching a trip has drastically changed.

When it comes to travel, it’s hard to overstate the importance of convenience and
trust. Rather than putting your faith in brands and people you don’t know, now you
might check out Instagram posts of beaches in Pattaya from your friends, or reviews of
Bangkok restaurants on Facebook. You can do all your research without leaving your
newsfeed until it’s time to book a flight.

For something that’s designed to make us happy, vacationing is still extremely

expensive and full of problems, whether you’re stuck waiting in an airport or struggling
to find a good hotel. Sometimes a good travel experience just comes down to not having
to deal with any headaches. Certain travel brands have recognized that by making a
concerted and creative effort to actually help their customers with useful content.

In this report, we’ll highlight the unique ways travel brands create, distribute, and
measure their content marketing, and look ahead at the emerging trends brands are
exploring to influence the customer journey.

The Marketer’s Guide to Travel Content

II. 4

Best Practices:
Content Creation

One of the hardest parts of content marketing is creating work that

resonates with a wide audience and stays true to your brand. Producing
a viral hit is nice, but it won’t do much good if it’s totally irrelevant or,
worse, antithetical to what your company stands for.

Perhaps no piece of content marketing did a better job of combining

resonance and relevance in 2015 than “HumanKinda,” a 16-minute
documentary JetBlue released in October to draw people’s attention
“HumanKinda” by JetBlue
to the growing epidemic of “busyness” in American culture. In addition to
being a playful look at why we never seem to have enough time for ourselves, the short
film tied in perfectly with JetBlue’s mantra of “bringing humanity back to air travel.”

“It was really about addressing something that we’ve seen as a societal endemic,” said
Morgan Johnston, JetBlue’s corporate communications manager. “I think we felt
JetBlue is an airline whose focus is on inspiring humanity. We were the only ones who
could really tell this story among our set.”

The documentary, hosted by comedian and Veep actor Sam Richardson, follows a
single mother and a man working eight jobs. Throughout the film, Richardson tries to

The Marketer’s Guide to Travel Content

Best Practices: Content Creation: JetBlue
help them find more time to relax. By including both a
serious interview with a sociology expert and a scene in
which one of the subjects comically dumps his phone
into a kiddie pool, “HumanKinda” does a great job of
keeping viewers laughing while forcing them to consider
how they can make their own lives less busy.
What’s also notable about this project is the medium
JetBlue used to convey its message: a short film. The
airline was one of several travel brands, along with
Marriott and Airbnb, that relied on longer videos this
past year as a way to connect with its audience. Phillip
Ma, JetBlue’s manager of brand advertising and content,
told Digiday, “A regular campaign with shortform
content would not have been able to spark conversation
on the scale we wanted.”
In addition to sparking a conversation, the depth of
more abitious pieces of content like “HumanKinda”
gives travel companies the opportunity to weave
their brands into the story without being intrusive.
For instance, JetBlue tickets are shown on-screen as
Richardson offers passersby in Midtown Manhattan
The Marketer’s Guide to Travel Content
5
the opportunity to fly to Puerto Rico for free, on the
condition that they leave that day. Otherwise, though,
the company’s logo and name are absent, save for
“Presented by” tags at the beginning and end of the film.
This hands-off approach to branding was bolstered by
the fact that JetBlue worked with relevant influencers to
create and promote the documentary. While the idea for
the project was conceived by the company’s ad agency,
MullenLowe, JetBlue chose to take it to Bianca Giaever,
a director with a strong track record of telling people’s
personal stories in a humanizing manner for outlets
like The New York Times, NPR, and BuzzFeed. After
the film was complete, the company screened it at an
event moderated by media mogul Arianna Huffington,
who has spoken passionately about how important it is
for people to take time away from their work to restore
themselves.
While other travel brands have approached the
relentless work culture, few have done so as
thoughtfully and thoroughly as JetBlue. Costa Rica’s
tourism board, for instance, made a music video in
Best Practices: Content Creation: JetBlue 6

which singing animals attempt to “save the Americans” by imploring

them to take a break from their long office hours. The U.K.’s Ethos
Travel produced print ads with overloaded schedules that spelled out
messages like “Help me God” and “Make it stop.” In both cases, the
message was humorous but a little more self-serving: You’re working
too much, so you should give us your money to take a trip.

By contrast, JetBlue’s documentary on “busyness” shed light on a very

“Flight Etiquette” by JetBlue
human story, providing entertainment and educational value to people
even if they couldn’t book a vacation. In doing so, the brand furthered its reputation
as a company that cares about consumers, which fits in with prior projects, like when
JetBlue gave free flights to altruistic social media users and offered humorous tips for
how customers could be more considerate of their fellow passengers.

“We wanted the film to be able to stand up on its own merits without a lot of JetBlue
branding,” Johnston said. “We didn’t want it to be a commercial, we wanted it to be a
commentary.”

To date, the video has been viewed more than 100,000 times on YouTube. More
importantly, Johnston said JetBlue has been happy to see people on social media using
the documentary exactly as it was intended: as a means to start a conversation with
their friends and family about whether our commitment to work is really helping us
get the most out of our time.

The Marketer’s Guide to Travel Content

III. 7

Best Practices:
Distribution

Travel is a highly visual experience, one that encourages people to use photographs
to preserve cherished memories, document stunning locations around the world, and
share their vacations with their friends. As a result, visual social media platforms like
Instagram and Tumblr have become hotbeds of user-created travel content, creating
a major opportunity for brands to show people exactly how spectacular their next
vacation could look.

Of course, even if you’re active on these platforms and post great images, you still
need a strategy that gets people to pay attention to your content in crowded social
feeds—an issue that was of particular importance to HotelTonight, which provides
last-minute hotel deals, as it sought to revamp its Instagram feed last year. Instead of
using the account just to promote the places people can book through the company’s
app, HotelTonight was looking to build an audience by refashioning the channel as a
lifestyle travel brand with broader appeal.

“Travel is so sexy. It’s the thing we all want to be doing,” said Janet Gardner,
HotelTonight’s head of editorial. “People are looking at [Instagram] to look at beautiful
photos and kind of imagine themselves doing the things all these other people on
Instagram are doing.”

The Marketer’s Guide to Travel Content

Best Practices: Distribution: HotelTonight 8

To hook viewers, HotelTonight made a simple but crucial move:

partnering with social influencers. The brand paid popular
Instagrammers and designers to use its app to book trips to
destinations ranging from Scottsdale, Arizona to Edinburgh, Scotland.
Then, with the #ByTheBookers hashtag, the influencers post the same
photos they’d normally take while vacationing.

This arrangement allows HotelTonight to populate its feed with high-

quality photos from around the world that have a personal touch. But
more than that, the campaign exposes the HotelTonight Instagram Scottsdale, Arizona Instagram page

account to the travel-loving audiences of its partners, some of whom

have more than 100,000 followers. Since May, the company has doubled
its own follower count to almost 50,000. According to a spokesperson,
HotelTonight’s user-generated photos receive 100 more likes, on
average, than its other Instagram content.

In addition to growing its Instagram audience, HotelTonight has

been smart about getting the most out of its content by repurposing
it on other platforms. The caption on an Instagram photo taken by
style photographer Leslie Schneider directs people to HotelTonight’s
Tumblr account, where they can find additional photos and a first-
person write-up of Schneider’s trip to New York City. Every Tumblr
post contains a link to download the HotelTonight app. HotelTonight’s Tumblr page

The Marketer’s Guide to Travel Content

Best Practices: Distribution: HotelTonight 9

Further down the marketing funnel, HotelTonight takes its most popular photos and
captions to craft the user-acquisition campaigns it runs on Facebook, Twitter, and
Instagram. The company targets frequent travelers and takes advantage of lookalike
modeling to identify users who are similar to its most profitable customers. By
creating sponsored posts that mimic the look and feel of its high-performing social
content, HotelTonight has been able to double the ROI of these ads.

If there’s one thing marketers can learn from HotelTonight, it’s that no matter what
channel you’re using, today’s consumers expect you to share content that feels organic
to the setting where they find it.

“The ROI has gone up because it doesn’t feel so jarring; it doesn’t feel as much like an
ad,” Gardner said. “It feels like something you would actually discover in your feed.”

The Marketer’s Guide to Travel Content

IV. 10

Best Practices:
Measurement and Optimization
You might have great content and a dynamic distribution plan,
but there’s no way you’ll ever know for sure unless you’re properly
measuring the impact of your work. Marketers now have a number of
tools at their disposal that allow them to track everything from how
many people shared a piece of content to how far down the page each
visitor scrolled. The challenge, then, lies not in the measurement itself,
but in choosing metrics that accurately reflect how your content is
influencing business results.

At Marriott’s expansive content studio, every piece of content is

conceived with a clear idea of what it’s supposed to accomplish and how
the company will measure those accomplishments. For the company’s
“Do Not Disturb” series of interviews with popular YouTube creators,
the objective is to drive brand awareness for Moxy, a line of millennial-
focused hotels. Meanwhile, the online magazine Marriott Traveler aims
to draw the attention of people searching for information about the
various cities with Marriott properties. “Do Not Distturb” series by Moxy Hotels

Full Disclosure: Marriott is a Contently client, and Marriott Traveler was created with Contently.

The Marketer’s Guide to Travel Content

Best Practices: Measurement: Marriott 11

At the center of this operation is M Live, the social command center

that Marriott introduced in October. As Contently’s editor-in-chief,
Joe Lazauskas, reported last year, M Live “has nine screens, showing
everything from the social media campaigns of Marriott’s 19 brands to
real-time booking information to Marriott’s editorial calendar.”

“There’s so many different purposes in the content that we do,” said

David Beebe, Marriott’s vice president of global creative and content
marketing. “How we’re going to measure the success, that strategy, the
distribution—that’s all planned from the very beginning. It’s not ‘Let’s
“French Kiss” by Marriot
go make something and then figure out what to do with it.’”

One of the most fascinating examples of this approach is how the company gauges the
success of its popular short films, like the Paris-based love story “French Kiss” or the
dance-infused dramedy “Business Unusual.”

For these short films, Marriott puts an emphasis on two factors: enjoyment and
recognition. To measure viewer satisfaction, the company focuses on a mixture
of traditional engagement statistics (views, likes, shares) and newer metrics like
completion rate to determine how much time people are spending with the content.
Additionally, Marriott looks at YouTube comments to see if viewers talk about how
much they loved the short films (and the brand that produced it).

The Marketer’s Guide to Travel Content

Best Practices: Measurement: Marriott
Take “French Kiss,” which has more than 6 million
YouTube views, an impressive number for any
digital video, let alone a brand film. Instead of just
being complacent with that stat, Marriott mined
the comments section for more insight, where users
shared what they got out of the film and complimented
Marriott on its work.
In order to determine whether the short films are
effectively building relationships, Marriott also runs
brand-lift and recall studies on YouTube and brand-
perception polls on the brand sites that host the films.
“We’re trying to build loyalty with next-gen consumers
by being where they are and giving them content that
entertains and informs them,” Beebe said. “If you do
that at scale, then they’ll remember that and they’ll
have that positive association with the brand. I wasn’t
hammering them over the head talking about myself or
saying, ‘Look at our pools, look at our restaurants.’”
The Marketer’s Guide to Travel Content
12
In terms of ROI, Marriott has creatively developed sales
packages for the short films that directly tie content
to revenue. For example, the “French Kiss” microsite
gave people an opportunity to book vacation packages
that came with competitive room rate, chocolates,
champagne, and a tour of the iconic Paris locations
featured in the film. According to Beebe, this offer
generated more than $500,000 over a two-month span.
With a strong system in place, Marriott’s data analytics
now inform the content it creates. For Marriott
Traveler, the company chose to make city guides for
three destinations that were popular searches on
Marriott.com and relatively undercovered by existing
travel publications. Soon, Marriott will have guides for
more than 50 cities across the U.S., with plans to expand
globally in the near future.
V. 13

Emerging Trends:
Virtual Reality
Why use a commercial to sell customers on the beauty of the Amazon rainforest or the
luxuriousness of a five-star hotel when you can take them directly to the place instead?

“Virtual reality is the most realistic experience you can have of a place without being
there,” YouVisit CEO Abi Mandelbaum told the Associated Press in December. “It’s
powerful. It gets people excited and engaged and interested in having that experience
in real life.”

Over the past year, travel brands have started to get comfortable diving into VR.
Shangri-La Hotel equipped its sales teams with Samsung Gear VR headsets, Visit St.
Petersburg/Clearwater produced in-house VR content, and Qantas offered first-class
passengers in-flight VR entertainment.

In the coming year, we expect travel brands to continue developing new ways to
capitalize on the experiential potential of virtual reality. Once VR can bring people up
close and personal with spider monkeys and toucans from the comfort of their own
home, it’s only a matter of time before they’ll be eager to see the real thing.

The Marketer’s Guide to Travel Content

VI. 14

Emerging Trends:
Locally Sourced Content
The success of travel content largely hinges on trust. Consumers
want to know that they’re getting accurate information from reliable
sources, not secondhand PR embellishments. That’s why so many
brands are using freelancers who live and work in destinations
around the world to help them create content with a dependable local
perspective.

Visitors to Kansas City’s tourism website can read about where the
city’s top local chefs like to eat, which is something you wouldn’t find “The Secret of Belfast” by KLM

in a generic guide book. Similarly, Royal Dutch Airlines (KLM) and its
multimedia travel magazine worked with Belfast native Jamie Stinson
to produce a captivating video guide to his favorite spots in the city,
and Marriott uses local freelancers via Contently to fill the pages of
Marriott Traveler.

“Sometimes locals tell the best stories,” said Allison Way, director of content strategy
at MMGY Global, a travel and hospitality marketing firm. “They know those those
hidden gems and those hidden secrets about the destination that sometimes our
copywriters or even the destination marketing organizations don’t know about.”

The Marketer’s Guide to Travel Content

VII. 15

Emerging Trends:
Print
With the unprecedented abundance of content available online, print
has become an exclusive medium. And in the travel industry, holding a
magazine in your hands still has plenty of appeal.

While airlines have been publishing in-flight magazines for years, some
companies have transformed the concept of thinly veiled brochures into
ambitious publications capable of rivaling traditional editorial outlets.

At the top of this list is Rhapsody, a high-end literary magazine from

“Rhapsody” magazine by United Airlines
United Airlines that includes contributors like Joyce Carol Oates and
Karen Russell, and gets distributed to first- and business-class passengers. Elsewhere,
Airbnb’s 2014 Pineapple told travel stories from London, San Francisco, and Seoul, and
the company is now considering creating a new magazine with Hearst. In 2015, Lonely
Planet and the Smithsonian also debuted new publications.

In 2016, print is thriving—not dying—thanks to the influx of high-quality

brand magazines.

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VIII. 16

Emerging Trends:
Personalization
According to Allison Way, 2016 will be the year personalization goes
from a perk to a necessity. Why? Because the more personalized you can
make an experience, the more people will feel connected to your brand.

For marketers in the travel industry, this presents an imperative to

show people content that is relevant to their individual interests
and circumstances. KLM’s magazine, iFly, shows different stories to
different users based on where they’re traveling and the level they’ve
reached in the company’s rewards program. Travel South Dakota,
meanwhile, serves custom family-friendly content to homepage “iFky” magazine by KLM
visitors identified as parents.

As consumers have grown accustomed to receiving tailored recommendations through

platforms like Netflix and Facebook, it’s imperative for brands to offer personalized
content in a way that the user finds organic.

“The amazing thing about personalization is that we have the ability to track what an
audience is viewing online, what they like on social media, and what they have clicked
on before,” Way said. “We can actually serve up content on a brand’s website based on
those features.”

The Marketer’s Guide to Travel Content

IX. 17

Conclusion

Over the last few years, travel companies have had to rethink the entire customer
journey. Travelers aren’t just basing their decisions based on standard guides—they’re
looking for trusted sources that relate to them on a personal level. As a result, airlines,
hotels, and tourism companies have produced some of the most ambitious and
successful content marketing projects of any industry.

“I think you can spend a million dollars or whatever you’re going to spend on a thirty-
second ad that eighty-two percent of people are going to skip over,” Beebe said, “or
you’re going to put money into something where people are actually engaging with it,
having a two-way conversation, and taking the time to talk about it with their friends.”

As brands get more ambitious with their content marketing, fostering these
conversations will only get more important in the coming years. And the films,
magazines, and social posts these brands produce will become increasingly popular
destinations in their own right.

The Marketer’s Guide to Travel Content

Thank
18

you.
Want more insights into the state of
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The Marketer’s Guide to Travel Content