5 Travel Brands Winning on Social Media for the Week Ending December 13, 2014

A handful of travel brands leveraged offline and virtual reality experiences last week in an effort to gain enough attention to increase their social media engagement.

Each week, we call out travel brands that have stronger than usual activity on social media. Using SkiftIQ, we’re able to track current performance versus past (60-day averages, unless otherwise noted) as well as notice spikes in activity that demonstrate a brand has either a viral hit on its hands or a public relations mess to clean up.

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The latest social activity on SkiftIQ for the week ending December 13, 2014:

1. Air Canada on YouTube

Air Canada retains the number one spot with a video about surprising a London bar filled with Canadians with roundtrip tickets back to Canada. It had ended the previous week with approximately with 1.5 million views. By this past Saturday, December 13, the views nearly doubled to 3.2 million views. At the same time, its YouTube account jumped by 150 Subscribers, a 344% increase over its 22 Followers/Day Average.

2. Hyatt Hotels on Twitter

@HyattConcierge is Hyatt Hotel’s dedicated Twitter account that provides social care to all its brand properties worldwide. According to SkiftIQ, they respond 99% of the time and clock in at 230 Tweets/Day Average. Its Followers grew by roughly 620 above its average of 43 Followers/Day. In addition to its standard hospitality gestures of wishing the guests a wonderful stay and commenting on their auto-fed Instagram snaps; conventions like CNBC Summit in Indonesia and Ohio Model United Nations; holiday parties contributed to new awareness and followers.

3. Tourism British Columbia on Facebook

Last week, Tourism British Columbia launched its first virtual reality experience via Oculus Rift for travel professionals in New York and Washington, D.C. Although this destination didn’t post about it on Facebook, its Page Likes still reported an average increase of 107% each day for four consecutive days from December 8 to 11. The content on those days celebrated the wonders of winter activities and rallied its community to sound off about their knowledge of the land.

4. British Airways on Twitter

On a daily basis, British Airways posts about the weather at Heathrow and flight updates. About 97% of their 450 tweets/day are related to social customer service. Although nothing happened out of the ordinary on December 11 and 12, its Twitter followers jumped by 48%. American singer-songwriter, Nicole Scherzinger — a former Pussycat Dolls member — took a virtual reality trip with British Airways to the U.S. via Oculus Rift. She was part of the montage on British Airways’ YouTube video to promote North American fares and holiday packages.