I’ve got a launch coming up in the next few weeks and consequently I’ve been paying particular attention to all the PR stunts and elaborate launches that have been taking place in the travel industry.  A few that I found particularly interesting:

• Leading Hotels of the World offered a promotion where 80 hotels would be priced at $19.28 for 80 minutes.  Unfortunately they ran into technical difficulties.  Thrice.  This promotion garnered LHW plenty of (mostly negative) publicity but it might have provided a traffic bump.  They may regret ever trying the promotion.
• LastMinuteTravel.com is currently offering a promotion where, for 15 minutes every day, hotels will only be $1.  Because the exact 15 minutes is a secret they probably won’t have the same scaling issues as LHW.  The discount pricing is accompanied by some YouTube videos that are actually relatively well done (although they look expensive to produce!)  This looks like a high investment promotion but I’m guessing it’ll pay off in terms of a tremendous traffic spike.
• LowCostTravel celebrated their relaunch by releasing video of their CEO driving around London in a bed.  Seriously (video below.)  The video can’t have been cheap to produce and has so far garnered nearly 600 views.  I bet the marketing department doesn’t want to calculate the cost-per-viewer metrics for that video.
• Not sure if this should be filed under PR stunt or stupid mistake but Activities Abroad recently sent out an e-mail promising “Chav-free Holidays”.  (For those of us not from the UK “Chav” is a derogatory term for white working class folks.)  Clearly this is pretty offensive but maybe all press is good press?  The jury is still out as to whether this will be a positive or negative for Activities Abroad. (*See clarification at end of post.)
  

I find the above examples pretty entertaining but I question the return on investment for these projects.  The problem I see with each of the above cases is that the promotion doesn’t match the firm’s value proposition.  After I book a hotel room for $1 how likely am I to go back to LastMinuteTravel.com for future full price bookings?  Clearly some consumers will become loyal customers but that number is going to be a very small percentage of the total promotion participants.

Call me old fashioned but I feel like any promotion or viral marketing campaign should be communicating a firm’s value proposition.  I’m also a big believer in building a great product/service, finding loyal customers who love the offering and helping those loyal customers tell their friends about the product.  (I guess that theory is why I’ll never be a creative director at a giant consumer products company!)

This is an issue I’ll continue to wrestle with over the coming weeks.  Obviously great companies use big launches and PR stunts because they create a massive traffic spike and often pay off.  On the other hand, as a bootstrapped company, I can see real benefit to slow organic growth of the user base and continued investment in product quality.

Here are a couple of the YouTube Vids referenced from above.  (Maybe you should do the LowCostTravel marketing department a favor and watch their vid twice to get views up to 600!)

CEO on a bed:

One of LMTClub’s $1 hotel videos:

*Update: as Alistair McLean mentions in the comments section – they never mentioned working class in the promotion.  Because I’m not familiar with UK slang I was basing my definition on the Wikipedia entry.  Also, interesting to note Alistair’s comment about the added traffic as a result of the controversy.