TBEX Knowledge: Frederic Gonzalo Shares Promotional Tips

I enjoyed a few seminars this morning from experts in travel promotion and how to use social media. Frederic Gonzalo from Quebec City showed off some interesting tidbits about innovations he has seen in this space.

Marriott, for example, is providing Go Pro cameras to their guests to use while they visit their Caribbean properties. No strings, no obligation to shoot video of their bellmen or lobbies–just a chance to grab the video camera and create new content about their Caribbean vacation. It’s a brilliant idea–and so far they’ve compiled hours and hours of high quality content and made their guests terrifically happy.

Other hotels offer free stays to anyone with a proven 50,000 or more Instagram followers. This makes sense because truly, anyone with that many followers is probably posting like crazy. Talk about win-win, and the hotel room was most likely empty anyway.

In Denmark, the VisitDenmark people have created ‘shareable places.’  They designated many places like the statue of the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen, and put up red signs with a specific hashtag to encourage people to share the site on social media.  In Montreal, a campaign called MtL Moments, encouraging people to use that hashtag when they shoot and post photos from the city.  In other words, provide people with hashtags and they will post about your destination!

Royal Caribbean has a new campaign that utilizes the latest social media phenomenon, Periscope, to promote their cruises. This platform offers people a chance to stream live video to people who follow them on Twitter. It’s easy to draw a crowd using Periscope.  The cruise company will then stream the live video on billboards around New York State. Wow. That’s a fantastic motivator, especially if it’s snowing.

Frederic also provided some guidance about hashtags.  They should be short and simple, easy to remember, work in several languages, be intuitive and significant. But most of all, they should be logical and pretty much be the first thing you think of when you quickly think of that topic.