Rome2rio, Wego & Tourism Australia, Starwood Hotels and Resorts, Accorhotels.com and Turkish Airlines emerged winners in the WITovation Awards, presented by Sojern, which recognizes excellence in digital marketing and customer experience.
The awards were presented at the WIT Conference on October 20.
Witovation winners with Stewart Hunter, Sojern
The 2015 winners were:
Data Specialist – Rome2rio
Content Magician – Wego & Tourism Australia
Absolute Mobile – Starwood Hotels & Resorts
Social Butterfly – Accorhotels.com
Editor’s Choice – Turkish Airlines
Yeoh Siew Hoon, Founder, WIT, said, “The WITovation awards are one of the highlights of the WIT conference and showcase the best in class in the travel industry. WIT’s goal is to engage, inspire and elevate the travel industry. We do this by celebrating – and sharing – our partners’ successes. This year’s award winners demonstrated creativity and impressive results in each of their categories.”
Data Specialist: Rome2rio
Rome2rio, a multi-modal transport search engine that helps travellers plan travel door-to-door, was recognized for its use of data science, which is the driving force behind its development efforts.
Data science techniques it employs include heat maps to understand destination preferences, autocomplete guess feature that allows “instant” results, SEO refinement that helps drive traffic and transportation images which build user confidence.
Judges applauded “the speed with which it is able to calculate multiple alternative complicated itineraries with many different constraints is super-impressive” and “great use of data across multiple devices to continually improve the product and drive travelers to find it within search results”.
Content Magician: Wego & Tourism Australia
Wego & Tourism Australia were recognized for a well-executed co-operative marketing partnership that had a very clear goal: to elevate Australia’s branding and grow its competitive position as an outbound destination choice for Indonesians.
To do this, high impact display advertising and inspiring content marketing was done around the “There’s nothing like Australia!” theme.
The results: US$4.26m of Australian booking referrals, 75 articles published over 3 months, with over 550,000 article views and 304,000 social media shares. Retargeting was also done as part of this campaign.
Absolute Mobile: Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide
Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide was recognized for its innovative SPG App and being the first in the hospitality industry to introduce a truly keyless mobile check-in feature. More than 130,000 of its loyal customers have registered for the Keyless feature.
Judges applauded the Keyless initiative saying, “It’s a winner if implemented right because it solves a problem.” It requires “clever re-engineering and integration of systems across the property and chains that come together to create the overall experience.”
Added one judge, “I’m super excited about keyless. The business traveller’s curse is to finally make it to the hotel exhausted, only have to queue up, fill in paperwork, juggle documents and answer questions before the rest and respite of the room.”
Social Butterfly: Accorhotels.com
Accorhotels.com won for a campaign it launched in Thailand to create local awareness of its brand. The key driver of the campaign was a video and its objective to build trust in the brand.
Judges said it was a “tear jerking sharable campaign – neatly tied in to the benefits of a direct booking experience”. It was also described as “unusual and refreshing”, and “a powerful concept, well executed and amplified across multiple social channels”.
As of 14 September 2015, the campaign had achieved tremendous feedback and engagements across all social media channels. On YouTube alone it amassed 1,123,649 views and more than 132,930 engagements. In the first week of the campaign launch there was a 60% increase in Thai traffic on the group’s website.
Editor’s Choice: Turkish Airlines
The editorial team of WIT chose Turkish Airlines’ Basukettoke campaign launched in Japan as its winner because it represents what travel is all about: the blending of cultures with the goal of making people happy. Dance is an easy way to put a smile on faces and the great results from the campaign should mean everyone is happy.
As the main sponsor for the Japanese Basketball BJ League between 2014-2016 for two seasons, Turkish Airlines wanted to find a way to show its support for basketball and to establish an emotional tie with Japanese basketball supporters.
It blended dance with Japanese karaoke to create a “Basukettoke” dance move which it showed in a teaser video which was watched more than two million times in a one-week period.
“We like the cultural mash-up – not only the blending of cultures but the blending of sports and dance – the dance moves that were easy and fun to do, and it created a social event that people could experience in both the real and virtual worlds,” said Siew Hoon.
