Hampton Inn: Most Idiotic Online Campaign Ever

Filed in archive Travel Industry on June 6, 2006

Were I handing out awards for Worst Hotel Marketing Campaign Ever, it would go to Hampton Inn's new Hampton Bed Heads campaign.

The hotel apparently has some fantastic new beds they'd like us all to know about; fair enough:

"The bed features three or four pillows providing consumers a choice in firmness, a lumbar pillow in a soothing color that provides guests back support if they choose to read, watch television or enjoy the Hampton lap desk and work while resting in bed. The super-comfortable new bedding package will be available in all of its more than 1,300 hotels by December 1, 2006."

And all of that sounds great but all of that information is from the press release, not from the website. The actual website has nothing to to do with beds; it is a chokingly staged, PR sanitised tale of 8 people who rest so comfortably in Hampton Inn beds that they wake each morning with legendary bed head. Yes - its a website not about beds, but about... bed head.

I so totally do not care about some random person's grooming issues. And I really really don't care about their 10 day tour sleeping their way through Hampton Inns across the USA and handing out pajamas in the lobby. And I really, really REALLY do not care about their sleep inducingly dull unrelated home videos either.

This is not in fact the worst marketing idea ever; its just the worst marketing implemention ever. If they actually set a group of people loose on a roadtrip with enough money to drink their way through several of the USA's hotspots so that they fell rat-arsed into a Hampton Inn bed each night (prefereably with each other) and then let them blog about it uncensored, it might actually make 30 days of totally entertaining online reading.

That would of course appeal to the entirely wrong demographic (who wants fun guests when you can have staid accountants and exhausted families instead?) and paralyze the marketing department with fear - God forbid anyone should hear directly from the consumers using your products and services.

But at least it wouldn't be a complete and total Flash-bloated waste of bandwidth.