With the wave of a wand, actor, musician and the all-around lovable and quirky Zooey Deschanel looks to make a couple’s travel dreams come true in a new marketing campaign from Choice Hotels International.
How? By removing the agony of analysis paralysis—that feeling one gets when they are just served up with too many booking options.
It’s a tactic hotel companies have been trying to do for years and with varying degrees of success. According to the U.S. Online Travel Agency Market Report 2021-2025, online travel agency gross bookings are on track to surpass pre-pandemic levels in 2023. For 2021, OTAs delivered $65.2 in gross bookings, reaching 82% of pre-pandemic levels.
According to Kalibri Labs, a benchmarking company that evaluates revenue performance net of customer acquisition costs, demand through Brand.com in 2022 was 24.1% compared to 17.9% for OTAs.
In the :30 and :15 spots, Deschanel is dubbed the “Fairy Hotel Mother” and, like a fairy tale, whisks away a couple that is confounded by the myriad hotel options, first to a Comfort hotel (now with their kids in tow—because Comfort rooms are capacious), then, with the wave of the wand, it’s off to an upscale Cambria hotel for some alone couple time. Another spot appearing soon will feature a single female on a girls weekend.
HOTELS spoke exclusively to Choice Hotels Chief Marketing Officer Noha Abdalla about the campaign, how the theme came to life and why they landed on Deschanel for the role.
“We did research with our consumers around the travel booking journey and how they make their decisions and a clear insight was the overwhelming number of options—all the screens popping up, all the tabs open,” she said, adding that consumers visit some 15 travel websites before making a hotel booking. “You want that confidence to know that you’re booking the right place.”
In order to get that message across, further research found that Deschanel, who is known for roles in such films as “Almost Famous” and “Elf” and TV shows such as “New Girl,” was a celebrity “who people trust,” Abdalla said. “She’s very accessible. She’s friendly. She’s fun. And she exudes confidence. We decided to work with her so she could bring that personality to our campaign and help our guests feel good about the decision they’ve made.”
Going big on an advertising campaign now might look curious in the face of a slowing economy and potential recession, but for Choice, along with many of its peers that franchise brands in the midscale to economy space, 2022 was a banner year. Total revenues reached a company record of $1.4 billion, a 31% increase compared to the same period in 2021, and RevPAR increased 14.6% compared to the same period of 2019.
“As the economy has gone up and down, Choice has actually fared really well,” Abdalla said. “What we find is that because we have hotel options across different price points and different locations, even in tough economic times, and given our business model, there isn’t anything that’s giving us kind of pause about continuing on our path of launching this campaign at this time.”
According to the Winterberry Group, advertisers are expected to spend an estimated $509 billion in 2023, up 6% from $481 billion last year, with around 60% of the total spent toward online channels.
Last year, Choice Hotels become even more diversified when it acquired Radisson Hotels Americas for approximately $675 million from Radisson Hotel Group. The deal added approximately 67,000 rooms to Choice and expanded its presence in the upper-upscale and upscale full-service segments, with brands such as Radisson Blu, Radisson Red and Radisson Collection.
For the ad spots, Choice decided to highlight its flagship Comfort brand alongside its upscale Cambria brand, the former having gone through a makeover/reinvigoration over the past several years to the tune of some $2.5 billion. “We invested millions of dollars with our franchisees in updating our Comfort hotels, and so it’s an opportunity to shine a light on the brand,” Abdalla said.
Meanwhile, the Cambria brand—at 60 properties in the U.S. still only a small fraction of Choice’s overall portfolio—shows consumers the higher-end version of Choice and, as Abdalla put it, it’s an opportunity for people to learn a little bit more about the brand and to “think of us in that upscale space.”
The spots, developed in partnership with McKinney, will run through the fall, and will air on TV and appear across Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and other digital channels.
The campaign at its core promotes ChoiceHotels.com as an “easy-to-use website” that offers the best price—”guaranteed.” And by booking direct, customers not only receive their Choice Privileges reward points, but receive the comfort and security that comes by booking at brand.com. In other words: you’re on your own if you reserve hotel rooms through platforms other than ours, like OTAs, which, in this spot, are the implicit evil step mothers.
“I still think we have work to do as an industry,” Abdalla said. “OTAs play an important role, and they’re going to continue to play an important role in the travel-booking space. But we want to remind customers that when they book on our website directly, they get a bunch of benefits that they don’t get when they book on the OTAs.”
These conveniences include loyalty program points accrual, a best-price guarantee, room preferences, expanded check-in/check-out options and even some leniency around cancellations. Horror stories abound of customers booking a room through an OTA only for there to be a snafu upon arrival at the hotel.
“We’re hopeful that we’re making some progress and as we continue to invest in our loyalty program, that becomes another kind of proof point for why people should book direct,” Abdalla said.
For her part, Deschanel said even she gets overwhelmed by the amount of booking options online today. “Traveling has always been a meaningful part of my life, so I’m always looking forward to that next getaway,” she said. “Yet, I, too, can get overwhelmed with all the hotel options out there, which is why I’m excited to be Choice’s ‘Fairy Hotel Mother’ and to help travelers feel confident that they are booking the right hotel.”
In a release about the new ad campaign, Choice cited research from Hotelmize that showed how consumers are weighed down and often confused by the many options available for booking a hotel stay and that 92% of millennials say finding the best hotel deal is important.