The challenge  

The pandemic saw an unprecedented rise in dog ownership in the UK, and with this came a shift in holidaying habits amongst owners with an increased desire to travel domestically with their four-legged friends. This provides Hilton an opportunity to educate UK travellers on Hilton’s acceptance of pets to drive stays with their pets and inspire them to book holidays with Hilton. A key challenge with the brief was choosing the right media environment to help us reach those niche in-market for travel who owned a dog. We also wanted to ensure media and creative was impactful. It needed to be fun and entertaining whilst reassuring our audience how easy and good value a trip with their pet could be.  

The approach  

We decided on a partnership with Tripadvisor due to their perfect alignment with travel audiences and a userbase that matches well to our target audience (almost half of their userbase being dog owners). We launched Pupadvisor, the world’s first online travel agency for dogs, a branded page on Tripadvisor. The Pupadvisor platform underpinned the activation, acting as an online hub for inspiration and trip planning. It featured travel tips, recommendations, and reviews from various dog personalities and showcased the business’ UK hotel range. Paid advertisements were used to amplify traffic to the Pupadvisor hub and relevant pages on Hilton’s site, exclusively targeting UK pet travellers and travel intenders with hotel intent, and staycations with pets through highly targeted Standard, Native & High Impact media.  

The results  

The campaign drove positive shifts in key brand metrics. Looking at the group exposed to the ad versus the control, there was a 26% increase in audience agreement that “Hilton hotels are welcoming to pets”, a 12% uptick in brand preference and a 3% rise in general brand consideration. Through this partnership, we were able to leverage unique pet-holiday planning moments amongst a niche travel audience, reaching them with fun, relevant and reassuring content.