Hotels, airlines and tourism boards are having to get a bit more creative these days to convince us would-be travelers to part with our hard-earned, hard-saved cash. And that means that when we’re looking around for the most interesting deal, marketers are really putting their thinking caps on to attract us. The kinds of deals that these guys are coming up with recently certainly makes planning a trip or learning about a new destination even more enjoyable, as in these examples:
- Air New Zealand: This airline seems obsessed with coming up with attractive marketing gimmicks, even in those heady pre-recession days, but an economic downturn seems only to have encouraged them to get even more creative. This week alone, two big stories came out of Air New Zealand camps. First up, they launched a TV advertising campaign featuring their staff almost naked and covered in body paint that looks like a uniform – even their CEO got on board and allowed himself to be painted up in a baggage handler’s outfit. And now today we’ve heard about Air New Zealand’s Matchmaking Flight – it’s set for October and you can get a return flight from Los Angeles to Auckland to attend a special matchmaking ball, as well as getting to know fellow attendees on the website between now and then.
- Great Barrier Reef: The Queensland tourism board drummed up millions of dollars worth of publicity this year with its World’s Greatest Job promotion – the deal where the winner gets to spend six months living on Hamilton Island in Australia, getting paid to relax, sightsee and blog about it. The winner was announced recently and a British guy named Ben Southall will be arriving on Hamilton Island on July 1, where he will be supplied with a three bedroom villa for accommodation, a buggy to get around in and enough trips and activities to keep him actively blogging about the Barrier Reef and presumably convincing many thousands of tourists to head there.
- Californian Wineries: After the success of the Barrier Reef’s “World’s Best Job” promotion, plenty of tourism-related places jumped on the bandwagon and advertised their versions of the world’s “second best” jobs – and one of these is as a wine taster at the Murphy Goode winery in Sonoma County, California. Apparently that job lets a very happy traveler earn $10,000 a month to taste hundreds of wines and letting people on Facebook and Youtube know about what they think – applications close on June 5.
photo credit: In Veritas Lux
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