Move over the Ides of March. In the 21st century, one must beware of the Ides of February for making the Valentine’s Day a memorable affair can be quite daunting! No doubt that it’s the sweetest time of year. And this year, OYO Hotels and Home went beyond the tried-and-boring ideas that revolve around chocolate, roses, and heart-shaped decor to make our customers’ Valentine’s Day special. We offered a myriad of options to our guests that helped them celebrate the festival of love in a truly amazing way! Here are some snapshots.
#ValentinesTogetherAlone
To encourage people to imagine the idea of celebrating love beyond a day, we ran Valentine’s Day Campaign on our owned Facebook and Instagram channels titled #ValentinesTogetherAlone. As a part of this creative and vibrant campaign, we listed 14 different things to do – one for each day of the campaign – and received raving feedback from OYO lovers globally.
Love Numbers
We issued the OYO Love Index 2019, which revealed that February 14 had increasingly become an opportunity for friends and families to bond and connect. In fact, OYO India witnessed an incredible 112% increase in bookings around the V-Day as compared to the same period last year. While we received 63% of bookings from couples, bookings from friends and family stood at 22%, which is a significant increase from last year.
Goa was the most preferred destination for couples followed by Delhi and Bangalore while maximum single bookings were made in Delhi. Interestingly, we received the first booking for Valentine’s Day 2019 almost a year ago on February 25, 2018. Bookings made through our App were 6.5X times that made on the Web, which showcases the growing preference of Indians to use an app to make a booking against other channels. The OYO Love Index was also replicated across some of our international markets, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, which had interesting bookings trends to share.
From ‘V’ Day to ‘We Day’
The experience of spending quality time with your significant other away from the hustle and bustle of the daily life at a relaxing OYO Home was the ideal gift we could offer to Nikhil and Neha Chawla. The Chawlas are a renowned social media influencer couple who graciously accepted our offer of an experiential stay at an OYO Home in Goa from February 13-15, 2019. To help them make the most of this once-in-a-lifetime staycation, we organized a spa session and a surprise candlelight dinner. And to transform every moment of their Valentine’s Day 2019 experience with OYO into beautiful memories, we gifted them a Polaroid camera.
Valentine’s Day is about celebrating love, so why not celebrate loving yourself?
To ward off any kind of pressure or negativity during Valentine’s Day we took the idea of loving yourself to the next level. Our proposed list of fun things to do this Valentine’s for those who preferred spending time with themselves was lapped up by every major offline and online media platform.
‘The Townhouse of Love’
What can be more symbolic of love than the OYO Townhouse, which is curated with a lot of care and passion to offer the best accommodation on a budget? That’s why the OYO Townhouse was at the center of our Valentine’s Day initiatives this year.
We set up a miniature OYO Townhouse in Cyber Hub, Gurugram, that featured fun activities like ‘spin the wheel’ to win prizes, such as free OTH stays and other OYO-branded goodies. These activities attracted a large number of visitors from all age groups, such as elderly couples to groups of friends and newly-married couples to college students. It was a rewarding experience for a lot of people, as our on-ground team handed out 42 free OYO Townhouse stays and more than 300 goodies!
OYO even walked the extra mile to make this Valentine’s Day extra special for two couples, who were chosen from a lucky draw and won an all-expense-paid trip each to Thailand!
To enhance the experience of our existing and new guests, we proposed exciting offers by partnering with Zoomcar, PayTm and Myntra to all our guests who came and stayed with us. To top it all, every user who accessed the OYO app for 7 consecutive days between 8-14 February 2019, was credited with INR 100 PayTm cash in their respective wallets.
Whether you’re a romantic or a cynic, Valentine’s Day is – and will continue to be – the time of the year when friends, couples, and families get a chance to create eternal memories! OYO, too, created one such long-lasting memory this year — of delighting our customers and giving them more reasons to check into an OYO property every time they travel.
