The challenge

During the pandemic, holiday hotspots were suffering more than ever before due to a lack of tourism. For many places that depend on this for their economy, it spelt financial trouble - and Next Vacay wanted to help. The aim was to increase awareness of the troubles faced by these tourism-dependent countries, and push travel to the areas hit the hardest once people were able to go on holiday again.

The idea

Pulling inspiration from the classic ‘sailor stranded on a deserted island’ trope, we created a hero video and multiple social assets showing these holiday hotspots calling out for help. We also estimated the loss of GDP caused by COVID-19 to back up the assets. Once it was all ready to go, we outreached the assets and data to national, lifestyle, travel, marketing and regional press in the hopes of landing links and bringing awareness to the problem.

The results

So far, the SOS hotspots campaign has received 35 links from extremely authoritative publications, including Washington Post, CNBC and Business Insider. We did exactly what we set out to do with this campaign, bringing links to Next Vacay’s website while raising awareness of the problems faced by these tourism hotspots.