Best Travel Ads This Week: Brands Tell a Story in 60 Seconds or Less

Travel brands are challenged to tell a compelling stories that keeps viewers’ attention while also communicating some urgency to act. This week’s ads nail it in an impressively short amount of time.

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TripAdvisor very simply displays how it can change users’ travel experiences by comparing hotel choice with and without the help of TripAdvisor. The ad succeeds in showing how the website can be used throughout a destination, through the voiceover, with a focus on hotels, through the images.

Similar commercials were designed for London, Orlando, Miami and Las Vegas.

KLM Airlines uses an ambient marketing campaign to connect locals in New York and Amsterdam as part of an elaborate contest to drum up publicity and hand out free tickets. Participants in both cities had to pull off a perfectly timed high-five to win tickets to the others’ city.

Campaigns such as this have become popular in recent years due to their video virality.

Expedia promotes its Expedia+ rewards program by pulling on viewers’ heart strings to show that all the trips business travelers *have* to take could one day lead to a trip that they want to take. Rewards programs offered by metasearch and booking sites has yet to take off in the way that hotels’ and airlines’ direct programs have, but that could change as a younger generation of travelers relies on a certain website more than a travel brand.

South Australian Tourism Commission highlights the region’s culinary culture with the above video, one of its films in the Through Local Eyes project. The film highlights regional chefs talking about how and why they cook to promote what is the region’s top tourism attraction.

The tourism board describes it as “a really honest, gritty, authentic view into what makes South Australia’s food and wine scene so amazing.”

From Marriott‘s Travel Brilliantly campaign, comes this new video from Grey Global that shows a well-produced, glamorous side of business travel. In Marriott’s attempt to attract millennials, it might have lost sight of real-world travel expectations.