BrandWeek has an interview with Betsy O’Rourke, Royal Caribbean's Senior Vice President of Marketing about it's recent advertising campaign dubbed “Vacation Daze". The new advertising campaign emphasizes the importance of taking vacation days and how many Americans do not use their vacation days and why that's wrong.
The advertising campaign is Royal Caribbean's attempt to induce a viral marketing campaign, advertising primarily on Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets in addition to the Royal Caribbean website. O'Rourke hopes consumers will send these videos to folks who are guilty of not taking their vacation days.
O'Rourke also mentioned that Royal Caribbean is doing better business as of late, although Royal Caribbean's numbers still lag a bit below their figures in 2008, before the financial crisis hit, "For Royal Caribbean, we are seeing a build up in demand. I can’t speak for the entire industry, but I follow what the U.S. Travel Association puts out. I came from the hotels business, and RevPAR [revenue per available room, a key metric] is up, and we’ve seen our business travel, meetings and incentives businesses pick up, so those are all very good signs. We also have more than 40 percent of our guests coming from international countries outside of the U.S. We’ve seen very strong demand across the board, but it varies country by country. We have not reached the ’08 levels yet, but we’re getting pretty close."
Also of interest is why Royal Caribbean chose to advertise only online, as opposed to using traditional media such as television. O'Rourke explains the decision like this, "Television creates a lot of awareness, but what we know is that people go online when they are actually searching to plan their trips. That’s why we’ve chosen these two channels."
