The Brand Initiative that Brought Travel Experiences Home

With the world focused on staying safe during the COVID-19 pandemic, Selicia Richards-Turney, senior brand manager, shares the story of how her team got the world to travel without leaving home. Today, she talks about our world at home brand initiative.

Working with travel suppliers of our best-selling tours, the team brought some of our experiences online. Viewers can learn to make ravioli or paint a Balinese watercolor. Travel publications such as The Guardian, Condé Nast, and Travel and Leisure have featured the initiative in their stories.

My name is Selicia, one of the senior brand managers based in Berlin. I'm originally from North London, and I was headhunted from a similar role at Uber UK. Brand manager is a title most people have heard of but may not realize what we do, because it's not a role that's widely understood.  

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Every brand manager effectively has the same goal, to devise the strategy that makes a brand successful. We do this by understanding what the customer base is and how to appeal to them.

The product should reach our target audience and be optimized for their needs and desires. It's the fun part of marketing as you get to help shape where the business is heading.  

Back to our roots: The best brand initiatives come from the heart

Our company is all about connecting tourists with incredible experiences, wherever they are in the world. The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the travel industry.

Travel has come to a standstill, and people are more concerned with staying healthy and being with loved ones. In times like these, the human spirit always prevails. But as people, yearning to explore the world is part of our nature.

In the beginning, we were learning on the job. The company had never invested heavily in creating this level or type of content for our social channels before. But what we did know was that travel experiences are all about creating memorable moments in our lives.  

That's what the world at home project is all about. The idea came from an immense amount of team spirit and the Creative Studio  team coming together to think about what the core of our brand is. The campaign is what our company stands for and how, during this time, we can stay true to our brand even when people aren't traveling.

We had the best talent to get us there. The Studio is a branch of our larger Marketing department and handles all our brand advertising. It’s like an internal creative brand agency – a collaboration of disciplines from other teams such as branding, copywriting, and creative designers.

Travel without leaving home: Curating the best tours based on customer reviews

We started to ideate the project when Berlin and many other cities around the world began to lockdown. Within two weeks, we ideated and built out how the world at home project would look. Hosted on GetYourGuide Magazine, we decided on two main content streams that would make up the campaign:

1. Feature articles: Travel activities and inspiration at home
2. Engaging videos: Virtual tours and experiences

As the lead for virtual experiences, I approached production with what we already knew, based on our data:

1. The platform is global and connects people to experiences while they are in-destination
2. Our data tells us that there are many different types of tourists with a plethora of interests that we cater to
3. Bringing these experiences to life in a virtual setting would be challenging but entirely possible.  

We took the following steps to shortlist the best tours:

1. Pulled sales data to look at which types of experiences were most popular
2. Categorized those into tours and experiences based on whether they fit into a traditional walking/attraction tour or if they were a physical activity.
3. Segmented those experiences further into ones that had positive customer reviews.
4. Sorted these experiences into ones that would still be accessible and fun to do at home.

Learning on the job: Producing virtual tours and experiences

With the help of the destination managers, we collected contact details of the selected travel suppliers. We reached out to them and our partners to introduce the idea of the campaign. We wanted to see if they would be happy to partner with us to create this content for our social channels.

We brought experiences that could be live-streamed and watched from home—for example, making Italian pasta. We reassured the tour and activity operators that we would manage all of the production that was physically possible virtually. Of course, we weren't able to physically help them with the basics of sound, lighting, and camera.

Instead, we guided them via pre-production video calls, guiding them on how to set up their spaces, so they're aesthetically pleasing. We also walked them through preparing their equipment ahead of the recording for sound and video quality purposes.

Although we had never done virtual tours before launching the project, we were confident we could achieve what we set out to do. We wouldn't have pursued it if we didn't think it was possible. Some of the other virtual tours we've conducted include:

• Taking a virtual tour of the Vatican Museum and Sistine Chapel
• Online street art workshop with graffiti artist
• Pizza making for kids

Most of the team had spent enough time watching platforms like YouTube and uploading content to Instagram, so one way or another, we are all creators, and our phones are great tools for us to be able to achieve this.

In the beginning, we were learning on the job. The company had never invested heavily in creating this level or type of content for our social channels before. But what we did know was that travel experiences are all about creating memorable moments in our lives.

Challenges push our limits and test our creativity

In the four weeks that we have been creating, producing, and posting live virtual experiences, we have moved leaps and bounds since our first live stream. We resolved many of our initial challenges, like story structure and timing.

For example, we prepared skeleton scripts to support the talent in staying on track. But we soon realized that we didn't put enough structure into the content to control the quality and length of the outcome. As a result, each piece was widely different in length, and we were not getting the best value out of the time in the video.

Although we had never done virtual tours before launching the project, we were confident we could achieve what we set out to do. We wouldn't have pursued it if we didn't think it was possible.

Once we improved the writing and structure of the segments based on the subject matter, we had better control over quality and time. This ultimately led to better videos that generated more views overall.

Funnily enough, the Italian cooking class we launched with is still one of our most successful videos to date. We're using learnings from this experience and some critical trend data from social platforms to plan a fun and engaging schedule over the coming weeks.

Other events on the schedule includes a Greek mythology special called Tales of Gods and Heroes and a Dutch cheese making experience with a visit to a farm. Hopefully, we'll get a quick peek at the baby cows.  

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has been a real challenge for all of us, one of the best things to come out of this is our ability to continue building our platforms to bring joy to people where we can't predict travel opportunities.

For updates on our open positions, check out our Career page.

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