Client: Le Club AccorHotels
Product: Hotel Loyalty Programme
Title: Seeker
Media: Cossette Media
Country: Canada
Date Of Campaign: June 29, 2018

Background: We were asked to build awareness and launch Le Club AccorHotels (LCAH) Rewards Programme through their heritage of luxury within key markets. Markets in Canada and the US with little to no awareness of the brand LCAH. Our job was to pique the curiosity of the industry and drive conversation of the program. Luxury is about understanding your guests’ desires even before they do. Affluent Travellers value experiences over rewards, They don’t ask brands to go further, they expect it. Our challenge was to do so in a way they haven’t seen before. As the owner of such iconic hotel brands as Raffles, Fairmont, Sofitel and Pullman, LCAH competes for guests at the top of the food chain. At this altitude, it rubs shoulders with the world’s best – banners like Oberoi, Four Seasons, St. Regis and the Ritz-Carlton, all of which pride themselves on absolutely impeccable customer service. With all of them operating at such a high standard of performance, sources of differentiation are increasingly difficult to find. At this level, there is no next level. Until now, what if you chose to empower your potential guests with a tool that would tell them more about themselves and their travel preferences than they thought they would ever need to know? And use that data to find their ideal travel destination?

Idea: To know our guests better than they know themselves we created the world’s first intuitive, biometric based travel planning tools – designed to reveal more meaningful, more personal destination suggestions.The plan had two stages: first, a live experience in which participants were exposed to carefully curated sensory stimuli while their biometric responses were recorded, analyzed and turned into a unique psychographic profile; and second, an online replication of that experience.The live experience exposed VIP guests to carefully curated sensory stimuli while their biometric responses were recorded, analyzed and turned into a unique psychographic profile.We tested their preferences along 6 psychographic axes, including solitude/togetherness, rural/urban, relaxation/adventure, family/romance, traditional/modern and cold/hot. Using behavioural analysis and biometric sensors, we measured heart rate, body temperature, EEG brain activity and galvanic skin response. While the live experience provided proof that Seeker worked, the challenge was to replicate the richness of experience online. The results of the live experience create a generative portrait of personality and emotion as unique as a fingerprint. The online solution, available across devices and in-hotel, had to do the same and find a way push through the screen to get to the heart of each user’s desires. Through selection speed and opt in heart rate tracking, we were able to measure impulse and spikes in excitement throughout the test. With that data generated from the physical/digital experience, we were able to generate a psychographic profile that gave us insight into not just where, but why they wanted to travel. Our software matched these profiles with more than 200 corresponding hotel properties and experiences that were measured against the same key travel motivation metrics. We used that profile to offer 3 destinations specifically calibrated to the priorities of each participant/online user. Influencer reactions from the live event were captured on film and used to promote the experience through their own media channels, in-hotels and on owned Accor digital properties, as well as on all paid digital and social channels including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook.

Results: SEEKER generated more than 12 million earned media impressions before paid media began, which had a sustained impact on engagement. Google Search Interest for Le Club AccorHotels increased 164% post-launch, and sustained a 49% YOY increase vs 2017. The digital version was completed by 30% of all visitors - well above industry standards and benchmarks.SEEKER thrust AccorHotels into the hotel loyalty conversation, moving from a brand that barely existed, to one that was being actively searched for and discussed.