Airbnb banks on celebrities and luxury influencers to promote collaboration with City Palace of Jaipur

Travel is a very competitive space to be in. Consumers are looking beyond just beautiful images and direct ads about places, but real experiences with the brand. Therefore, Airbnb’s marketing strategy mostly revolves around true stories of people who have experienced the brand and content plays an important role in doing so.

Recently, Airbnb collaborated with City Palace of Jaipur. From November 23, the Gudliya Suite at the City Palace will become accessible to outside guests and can be booked for the first time ever on Airbnb. Maharaja Sawai Padmanabh Singh is the first Maharaja to offer a stay at his palace on Airbnb in order to help support women’s empowerment initiatives of Princess Diya Kumari Foundation. It’s not very common to have a palace’s suite on rent so this is something that will give an edge to Airbnb over its competitors.

Airbnb launched campaign, #RoyaltyOnAirbnb, to promote the initiative. It invited a few celebrities and luxury influencers to the palace, experience it and then talk about it on Instagram. The brand associated with Hindi cinema celebrities such as Karishma Kapoor, Parineeti Chopra, Gauri Khan and Mandira Bedi. These celebrities were able to manage to fetch more than five million reach with an estimated media value worth Rs 50-60 lakh.

Posts by celebrities:

https://www.instagram.com/p/B4wjcpYF2fq/

https://www.instagram.com/p/B4wdunFp_ry/

Posts by luxury influencers:

https://www.instagram.com/p/B4uy0l6gmVv/

https://www.instagram.com/p/B4w3qjEgz9U/

The brand brought on board celebrities for the campaign as they have a huge following on social media and collaborating with them brought instant awareness for the new initiative.

From the Sheeko Brandscore graph, one can see Instagram and influencer marketing has been an important part of the brand’s marketing strategy. Many influencers and celebrities promoted Airbnb in September earlier this year as a major spike can be seen. So from this, we can assume that Airbnb is actively promoting itself through Instagram and it might be helping them to gain a good consumer base.

One of the posts by Nargis Fakri in September:

https://www.instagram.com/p/B2XyJmfgzwc/

Once in an interview with BuzzInContent.com, Varun Raina, Marketing Head, Airbnb India, talked about the brand’s influencer marketing strategy, he said, “We at Airbnb feel that today’s youth holds a strong connection with the social media influencers, especially the celebrities they follow and love, as well as with the media they consume. Needless to say, their aspirations and desires are often inspired by trends that their favourite personalities set. We see this as an opportunity to connect with our audience and enable them to resonate with our philosophy through popular culture and by collaborating with famous personalities who associate with Airbnb.”

Raina also mentioned a few golden rules of content marketing that Airbnb keeps in mind while undertaking the content marketing route, Raina said, “The golden rule of content marketing is to optimise your content for engagement with your target audience, personalise the experience, capture audience attention in their moment of interest at a preferred medium of content consumption, and be sure to retarget users who have already visited your website or product for successful conversions.”

The brand has also launched a video which captures Maharaja Sawai Padmanabh Singh welcoming guests to his home to experience royalty like never before.

The video:

Airbnb’s brand philosophy of ‘Belong Anywhere’ coincides with the riveting stories of the royal family who have inspired many. This collaboration especially focuses on supporting women’s empowerment.

The palace has never been available to be booked by outside guests before. Proceeds from each booking will go to the Princess Diya Kumari Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to supporting rural women and artisans in Rajasthan.  For the remainder of 2019, the Gudliya Suite, priced at $8,000 per night, will be available to book on select nights at a special inaugural offer of $1,000 per night, with Airbnb paying the balance amount for each booking as a contribution to the Foundation. From January 1 onwards, the suite will be available for guests to book at the full $8,000 rate.

Some time ago, the brand launched an India market-specific campaign, ‘That’s why we Airbnb’, narrating the stories of real travellers. The campaign celebrates the uniqueness of life, the concept of nonconformity, and the mavericks who march to the beat of their own drum.

Campaign:

In April 2017, Airbnb launched its marketing campaign in India ‘Live There’, designed to encourage people to change the way they experience the world around them. In line with its vision to make travel magical, Airbnb partnered with MTV India to curate the #LiveThere online contest in September last year. Through this contest, Airbnb invited three lucky winners for a trip of their lifetime to explore the vibrancy of Milan, London and Thailand like locals in the company of popular icons Anusha Dandekar, Radhika Apte and Nikhil Chinappa.

Founded in 2008, Airbnb is a global travel community that offers end-to-end trips, including where you stay, what you do and the people you meet. Airbnb leverages technology to economically empower millions of people around the world to unlock and monetise their spaces, passions and talents to become hospitality entrepreneurs.

Airbnb’s accommodation marketplace offers access to millions of places to stay in more than 191 countries, from apartments and villas to castles, treehouses and B&Bs.