Marriott embraces adventure travelers with GoPro deal
By Charlie Zaharoff, Outdoor
Why did Marriott, a top-three global hotel chain with no particular emphasis on the adventure-travel niche, just partner with GoPro to let guests borrow Hero4 cameras at 18 of their Caribbean and Latin American locations?
“It’s low-hanging fruit,” says Daniel Kelsay, GoPro’s Resort and Camp marketing manager. “Marriott’s guests have always taken videos, and they love to share them, but Marriott could never harness it. It’s basically free marketing.”
As Kelsay says, it’s about social media, or, in other words, free customer-generated advertising. Marriot wants guests to upload images to their Facebook and Instagram accounts using the #TravelBrilliantly handle. No surprise there. Plenty of hotels encourage their guests to upload their photos using specific hashtags. And Marriott’s partnership with a camera company to facilitate that makes sense, too.