Client: Internova Travel Group

Campaign: Go Human. Book Human.

The Challenges and Goals:

Internova Travel Group has over 6,000 company-owned, franchised, and affiliated travel agencies in over 80 countries around the world. With over 65,000 travel advisors they offer a personal touch to high-end leisure, luxury and corporate travel.  

It goes without saying that Covid has wreaked havoc on the travel industry as a whole, but Internova saw an opportunity to change the way people approach travel planning. Given the ongoing complexity of travel restrictions and nuances in travel rules from city to city there was an increasing requirement for human-to-human interactions for specific and accurate advice. However, the world has primarily gravitated towards AI-driven, self-serve online booking, even in the space of luxury and corporate travel. In fact, many have become hooked on the ability to directly and cheaply piece together their own travel agenda. Internova specifically focuses on human to human, concierge style travel bookings and the current market condition played well into their wheelhouse

Internova tasked us with promoting the value of booking through humans with the attitude that rising tides lift all boats. Engagement and recall were seen as key performance KPIs. 

The Insights and Strategy:

When you book direct online you are gaining access to the same experience that thousands of others do. There is nothing unique, nothing personal about the experience. You are served solutions based on calculations on your existing interests and the interests of others who appear like you to a machine. Also, particularly salient during covid, if anything were to go wrong on your trip, AI can’t help you.

Insight: Artificial Intelligence doesn’t care if your trip doesn’t go well because it isn’t programmed to care, it is only programmed to sell. However, humans are designed from birth to provide the care you need.

Our strategy was to deposition AI driven booking engines by bringing them to life as cold, creepy and uncaring, lacking any stylings of humanity and personal interest and resolve that tension with the most human online experience that we could imagine.

The Execution:

Our idea: Go Human. Book Human.

We designed an entirely new brand identity for Book Human, which brought to life a nostalgic expression of travel, reminiscent of the days of travel glory, where it was deeply personal and exciting. The palette was warm and the images intoxicating.

We started with an online video ad which will target Toronto, New York and Los Angeles markets that showcases a creepy android who ushers the viewer around a desolate, less-than-ideal property as he extols the reasons why the selection is perfect for you, based on your data, everything it knows about you, and the review of thousands of others who have come before you. The story finishes with the line “don’t let a machine choose your vacation. Go Human. Book Human”. After seeing this video you will never want to book through an engine again. The video is broken down into online video social posts of the android with poignant lines like “if machines can’t dream, how can they plan your dream vacation” that run over the scene. Similar questions are posed in static form in Out of Home executions.

We have also designed digital ad units that show an animated sequence of code responding to a human travel query. The result is an eye-opening revelation of just how inhuman the process of online booking really is as we ask the question “how will you decide?”

Finally, we created the internet’s first human travel site at the URL BookHuman.Travel  (a new brand generated by BHLA for the campaign, but that has been given the green light to be an ongoing business concern replacing existing digital experiences) will connect visitors directly to live human travel advisors who specialize in their specific area of travel interest. The site is a giant search engine that prompts the user to search for their destination of interest and the results are dictated by which of the 65,000 advisors are online and specialize in that area of travel to facilitate a live human conversation.

The Results and Impact:

While the campaign is fresh in market we do have early indicators of significant success.

The campaign has garnered over 50 articles in the travel and consumer sector, which has extended the campaign reach.

We have also achieved 12% ad recall, which is double the industry norms currently set at 4-5%, showing significant consumer engagement.

Our current CPM is presently incredibly efficient and is measured at 50% less than the industry standard, again showing high consumer interest in the content.