BACKGROUND
Online travel booking is competitive, and consumers see little difference between brands. In 2022, travel demand in the U.S. had almost fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels, but the competition between online travel agents (OTAs) was as fierce as ever.

No OTA can truly own or gain credit for the destination experience, so we would be the travel site that focuses on the experience of planning and booking the trip that begins the travel journey.

In the work, we established the booking experience not as a source of stress, but rather as one of the best parts of the journey.

IDEA
Inspired by all the options on Booking.com, our hero Melissa McCarthy gets swept away on a whirlwind musical tour of vacation rentals, hotels, and wigs galore. While most travel advertising is focused on aspirational locations, we romanced the booking experience itself. Filmed both on-location and at the CGI Volume Stage, and backed by a 33-piece orchestra, this piece showed the world that “Booking is half the fun.”

This campaign celebrates the return of leisure travel by featuring beloved star Melissa McCarthy booking her first post-pandemic trip. The main film is an over-the-top musical called “Somewhere, Anywhere.” In it, Melissa imagines all the places she could go and uses Booking.com to find accommodations that meet her exacting specifications.

The Big Game :30 and two-minute film that ran during the Oscars were two of the most visible parts of a massive, year-long campaign to grow Booking.com in the United States and globally.

RESULTS
The Somewhere, Anywhere ad, which aired during the second-most-watched Super Bowl game in history, and again during the Oscars, was an incredible success. After the ad aired during the Super Bowl, the brand saw a 400% increase in Booking.com-related searches, and it became the #1 most watched Super Bowl ad on YouTube with over 118 million views, and still counting. The campaign also generated a high volume of earned media coverage, with over 3,200 stories covering the work, and 94% of the coverage garnering positive sentiment.