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Kayak Launches Massive Old-Fashioned Ad Blitz

You'd think the recession would have catapulted price comparison engine Kayak.com into universal traveler awareness. The company's internal figures, though, tell a different story. Less than 1/3 of the more than 100 million Americans who use travel booking sites know about Kayak. Even less are able to differentiate Kayak from similar-on-first-look but significantly different competitors like Expedia. In a move that's bound to raise eyebrows in the travel industry and among travel advertisers, the company is shifting their resources into a massive offline ad campaign.

The new ad blitz was launched over the weekend and is set to blanket primetime cable through 2010. CNN, ESPN, and MSNBC have all been selected as venues, presumably on numbers promising that most coveted of travel industry demographics: 25-44 year olds with disposable income. Forbes.com has a full writeup on the campaign, including a description of one of the "witty 30 second spots":

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Tags: Political Travel / Honduras Travel / Travel Advertising / Tourism Boards / Travel Ads / → All Tags

Honduran Tourism Minister Launches Blistering Ad Campaign Against...Honduras?

Normally when you see negative travel advertising about a city or state, it's one locale trying to play itself up as an alternative to another and occasionally you run into a campaign that's more or less being done to punish a place. An example of this is food companies' punitive response to New York's ongoing war against smoking/alcohol/transfats/fun, but it's very unusual to have a campaign that's just pure "don't go to this place" spite. What's been happening in Honduras, where the exiled Tourism Minister is screening negative ads about his own country, is indeed very unusual.

The politics down in Honduras are obviously a mess. Manuel Zelaya was ousted from the presidency with various degrees of legitimacy and justification, the answer to that varying with where you fall on the political spectrum. The US government, along with Honduras' neighbors, insist it was a coup. The Honduran Supreme Court, legislature, and army mostly beg to disagree. None of that matters for our purposes. Instead we enter the story where Ricardo Martinez, Zelaya's former Tourism minister, is invited to act as the country's legitimate representative at the Central American Travel Market.

He was, all things considered, not the best imaginable spokesman for the Honduran tourism industry...

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Tags: Travel Advertising / Travel Ads / Las Vegas / Las Vegas Travel / → All Tags

Vegas.com Spoofs SportsCenter To Encourage Tourism

Most people have at least a passing knowledge of the famous ESPN SportsCenter ads, where sports mascots work as employees in the SportsCenter studio. Vegas.com is trying to build on that familiarity with a new Las Vegas campaign, except they're replacing franchise mascots with casino characters and the SportsCenter studio with... um...the Vegas.com studio? Maybe? The entire campaign could actually stand to be a little bit more punchy. Also a little bit more funny.

The clips are being posted over at Vegas.com/exposed. After the jump we've put one of the commercials, a spot that plays on the Treasure Island pirates. When we originally found this thing on AdFreak they included it with a clip starring Carrot Top. We obviously like you guys too much to expose you to that.

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Tags: Travel Advertising / Amsterdam Travel / Hostels / Budget Travel / Travel Ads / → All Tags

'The Worst Hotel In The World' Has The Best Advertising Campaign

The UK's KK Outlet ad agency was tasked with selling a generously described no frills hostel in Amsterdam.

The hostel in question, as you undoubtedly figured out from the ads, is Amsterdam's Hans Brinker Budget Hotel. Lest you think they're joking about the lack of amenities, or that their self-deprecation is a passing thing, the establishment website hawks a book titled The Worst Hotel in the World: The Hans Brinker Budget Hotel Amsterdam. They're proud all of it, from the nonexistent bedding to the subpar customer service. It's like they're the Ryanair of hostels.

Via Advertising Is Good For You, Pure genius:

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Tags: Travel Advertising / Tourism Boards / Wisconsin Travel / Travel Ads / → All Tags

Entire County Wants You To Friend Them On Facebook

The tourism board of Northern Wisconson's Forest County Chamber of Commerce has reached back to old media to promote their new social media campaign, erecting a billboard on Highway 32 to highlight their Facebook fan page. The idea is to promote the Facebook page as a portal into the rest of the county's tourism promotions, with pictures, links to more specific sites, and event information. Cute:

Sadly, no one talks about billboards any longer. But they're still out there and they still work. So why are we talking about the lowly billboard today? Social media, of course... it's big news when a billboard is used to promote a Facebook page... Located just south of Lakewood on HWY 32, travelers from Milwaukee and Chicago heading north will see the board which carries an invitation from the Crandon Chamber to "Become a friend of Crandon" on Facebook.

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Tags: Fast Food Travel / Travel Ads / Travel Advertising / Japan Travel / McDonalds / → All Tags

New McDonald's Campaign In Japan Imagines Americans As Nerdy, From Ohio

McDonald's is launching a new ad campaign in Japan, this time revolving around four new burgers they're making available exclusively on the island nation. To spearhead the effort, they're rolling out their local mascot Mr. James, a kind of stereotypical American nerd who speaks broken Japanese but is very, very exuberantly bubbly about it. The only problem is that the actual Americans who live in Japan loathe the character, who is roughly the reverse equivalent of when Americans put on fake Japanese accents by turning 'l's into 'r's.

Except on top of having pronunciation problems, Mr. James is an incoherent and painfully annoying simpleton. He stars in a number of spots in this campaign, going to McDonald's locations all over Japan and musing about his favorite burgers. He even has a blog, on which he goes into deep background about his Ohio birthplace and about how he loves to shower foreigners with cash. That last bit isn't part of the stereotype; it has something to do with a cash prize McDonald's is giving out, but the rest of the ensemble has Japan's small foreign community less than pleased:

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Tags: Travel Advertising / Travel Ads / Canada Travel / Twitter / Wild Animals / Tourism Boards / American Airlines / → All Tags

Canada's Most Famous Squirrel Turns To Twitter To Promote Travel

Remember this photo from a month ago, with Melissa Brandts and her husband, joined by the world's most recent celebrity squirrel? It went from Lake Minnewanka, in Canada's Banff National Park, to the National Geographic "Photo Of The Day" site. Then it went pretty much everywhere.

American Airlines is betting you remember this mini-meme quite well, which is why they've pulled their "French guy training squirrels on scooters" advertisement out of the vault. In case you missed the not-entirely-unobnoxious ad when it originally aired in the spring, here it is again:

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Tags: Travel Advertising / Travel Ads / Las Vegas Travel / → All Tags

Las Vegas Doubles Down On Angry Rodent-Based Tourism Campaign

The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority hasn't had the easiest time in the recession, even accounting for their frustrating ability to hijack international tourism in the name of short-term profits. So the Authority reached out to ad agency R&R Partners for some TV spots, and the agency responded with a strategy built around office drones using a fake holiday to get Mondays off. A fake holiday about rage-filled chinchillas. Chinchilli Day.

The second spot just dropped and has the office worker spinning a Three Musketeers tale of French heroism. It builds on the first spot, where Chinchilli Day had an exactly opposite background and the animals were cast as the villains. Sin City is in the midst of a rebranding campaign highlighting angry rodents, and by all accounts it seems to be working. Terrific.

Check out the following two commercials after the jump.

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Tags: Travel Advertising / Denmark Travel / Sex Travel / Travel Ads / → All Tags

Apparently Denmark Has A Custom Of Anonymous Sex With Tourists

You know, we always thought that Southeast Asia and Jamaica were the hotspots for sex tourism, that is until we watched this video advertisement for Denmark. It's a brief bit that appears like an earnest new mother searching for the father of her child, someone with whom she had a random one-night-stand, and he happened to be a tourist.

Now she's got a baby (named August, aww) and it's all thanks to the Danish "custom" of hygge, or hooking up with random foreign strangers. Although Denmark wants to promote its nightlife in this way, we're not so happy about their encouragement of anonymous and unprotected sex, and it sounds like the rest of Denmark agrees with us, since the spot has been pulled thanks to a backlash. But of course, not until it had already gone viral and generated more buzz than the ad agency had ever hoped for.

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Tags: Tourism Boards / Travel Advertising / Finland Travel / → All Tags

'Nordic Exposed' Scandinavia Campaign Sounds Dirty, But We Wish

We really have nothing much to add substantively to this new pitch from Scandinavia: yes, Scandinavia is neat; no, the region doesn't get enough credit for its variety; yes, more people should probably consider vacationing there. That's not happening and so travel board reps from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden have been dispatched to Australia to generate some interest. Fair enough.

They're calling their workshops "Four Seasons and over 1000 Reasons to visit Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden." And this is where things, as it were, take a metaphorical turn south. We've been getting inundated with travel board press releases and, frankly, we're getting a little bit worried about our friends in the industry. We're beginning to fear that the recession has pushed some of them over the edge. First there's the title itself, which has all the light breezy freshness of a decaying log. And then there's this:

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Tags: Guatemala Travel / Tourism Boards / Travel Advertising / Facebook / → All Tags

Guatemala Puts The Word Out That They're More Mayan Than Mexico

The Guatemala Tourism Board has become the latest tourism organization to go all-in on web marketing. The board's new "Last Minute" campaign tries to bring together potential travel customers with potential travel providers. Ads will be placed on Google and Facebook and aimed at users who are already searching for Guatemala-related topics, so it won't interrupt your Facebook zombie app or anything.

Users who click on the ads will be taken to a campaign-specific English/Spanish website. The site tries to go beyond the usual "come here because we're awesome" tourism site, linking the 70+ sponsoring travel companies with users. Offers run the gamut from accommodations to food to activities. The site will also include 25% off coupons for these amenities, plus car rentals and tours.

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Tags: Travel Advertising / LGW / Fashion Travel / Airplane News / Travel Ads / → All Tags

'Runway Fashion' Means Something Totally Different To Gatwick Airport

We love photoshopping sunglasses onto an airplane just as much as the next travel dork, but really—the above ad campaign from London-Gatwick Airport is taking it a bit too far.

Looking to promote Gatwick as a shopping destination, and not just for last-minute trashy paperback books or inflatable neck pillows, the airport placed this faux fashion spread into a British LGBT magazine, Attitude, and—we guess—hopes that the gay population og southern England comes running to buy chains and leather boots duty-free.

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