Thanks to robust consumer demand and low oil prices, the travel and hospitality industry is on an upswing. Meanwhile, increased competition and the rise in mobile has forced the industry to become more personalized than ever in its digital and social efforts. As both brand visibility and competition across social increases, online spend continues to rise—right alongside customer expectations. Travelers are also increasingly connected to social throughout their journey: they demand more personalized support in times of need, but they also offer travel and hospitality brands more occasions to connect with them. When done effectively, this can foster lasting loyalty. We’ve collected advice from three successful travel and hospitality brands who’ve achieved social excellence on three important fronts: marketing, social care, and crisis management. Dive into these stand-out examples from industry-leading brands to learn how your enterprise brand can succeed on social, too.

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How Four Seasons, Hawaiian Airlines, and Royal Caribbean Succeed on Social

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Four Seasons New York Stand-Out Marketing Campaign

WHAT THEY DID

Four Seasons New York creatively targeted a brand new audience with an irresistible social campaign, thereby boosting profits during an otherwise slow season.

Business travelers are the luxury hotel’s main customer base, but business travel slows during the summer months. To boost revenue, Four Seasons New York aimed to target a new audience segment: families. In a 12-week campaign designed especially for social, they asked fans to guess the location of Maxine, a plush toy, as she made her way around Manhattan.

WHY IT WORKED

• The #MaxineTakesManhattan campaign linked the digital world to the brick-and-mortar with photos of Maxine at check in, postcards on pillows during turn-down service, and Maxine coloring pages in the restaurant, building fan excitement about both New York City and the Four Seasons hotel.

• Four Seasons also enlisted the aid of Mom bloggers to reach their new target audience.

Four Seasons New York Stand-Out Marketing Campaign

HOW YOUR BRAND CAN DO THE SAME

• To boost revenue during a lull, consider targeting audiences your brand hasn’t before—look at demographic data, booking trends, and scour social for mentions of your brand. You might find brand-relevant chatter in unexpected places.

• Incorporating user-generated content (UGC) captures the attention of social media users, helps your brand appear more authentic, and boosts your brand’s credibility among social users.

• Easily take your campaign to the next level with a contest or curated display of submissions, while keeping fan data in one place for seamless social interactions.

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Hawaiian Airlines Exceptional Social Care WHAT THEY DID

Hawaiian Airlines serves a unique demographic—people celebrating milestones and taking special trips—so their customer-care efforts are an important focus. Making each customer feel special and heard is central to Hawaiian Airlines as a whole, and their social team embodies these efforts.

WHY IT WORKED

• After implementing Spredfast, the team saved 5-8 hours a week in efficiency, allowing them to better coordinate brand love moments.

• Hawaiian Airlines serves a global audience that speaks different languages and has different needs: using distinct regional social channels, they are able to target content to specific audience segments.

• Because the airline serves Hawaii itself, the social team monitors competing airlines as well as relevant hashtags, like #Hawaii, which offers insights other Hawaiian Airlines teams, like PR, can use.

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Hawaiian Airlines Exceptional Social Care

HOW YOUR BRAND CAN DO THE SAME

• Ensure your customer care strategy aligns with your brand’s core values. Hawaiian Airlines is driven by an overarching mission: embody the spirit of Aloha—Hawaiian hospitality—in every interaction.

• Optimize your care team to ensure customer issues are efficiently resolved. Use Spredfast to automatically route questions to the right people, track time-to-response, and understand peak social traffic times to appropriately staff your care team.

• Coordinate care efforts with marketing efforts to build brand love: Determine who makes up your core audience—their demographic features, what their needs are, and why they tend to use your brand—and target your social content and interactions towards them.

• Use Spredfast to keep track of competitors on social, monitoring where your brand stands in comparison and where can you improve.

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Royal Caribbean Expert Crisis Management

WHAT THEY DID

When an Atlantic storm threatened the safe passage of one of its cruise ships, Royal Caribbean International made the decision to return to port early, thereby cutting short the vacations of everyone aboard—an unpopular decision. Then, rumors began to swirl that the ship was actually headed home early because of a norovirus outbreak. Royal Caribbean International responded to the ensuing social media crisis with grace.

WHY IT WORKED

• Once the quick, confident decision to return its ship early was made, they made their decision known and stood by it firmly across all social channels.

• When social users questioned whether the norovirus outbreak was the real reason for returning to port, Royal Caribbean International answered concerns head-on and put rumors to rest.

• They then tracked and labeled all relevant conversations in real-time on social using Spredfast, which allowed them to keep track of public sentiment, maintain consistent and helpful dialogue with concerned customers and fans, and helped them understand when conversation had died down enough that responses were no longer necessary.

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Royal Caribbean Expert Crisis Management

HOW YOUR BRAND CAN DO THE SAME

• Organize your team ahead of time. Negative attention on social can happen to any brand, at any time, and preparing for an exact scenario isn’t possible. However, brands with a strong response plan in place before a crisis occurs fare better.

• Track trends and conversations on social in real-time during a crisis and respond to topics that matter most to your audience—and understand when the crisis has passed and your audience has moved on (and when you should, too).

• Keep responses on-message, empathetic (if appropriate), and human: canned or overly sanitized messaging won’t connect with audiences as well and might even cause more negative sentiment.

• Each crisis (minor or not) presents a learning opportunity: once the storm has passed, reassess your crisis-response strategy and build on it for next time. Use Spredfast to review which responses resonated best, at which points throughout the crisis sentiment reached highs and lows, and how efficient you were at managing responses.

Three enterprise brands, three killer tips, one bottom line: An attention-grabbing marketing

campaign that plays to social’s strengths, accompanied by consistent and helpful social care

and–when necessary–honest and accessible crisis management will consistently spell ‘social

success’ for the travel and hospitality industry.

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