Online travel competitions: fuel your audience’s appetite for adventure

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There are a lot of beautiful places in the world, and while the big hitters like the Pyramids of Egypt, Pompeii, and Machu Picchu might dominate a lot of people’s bucket lists for places to travel to, travellers and holiday makers love a hidden gem. Part of the fun of going on holiday is throwing out the guidebook and adopting the “when in Rome” approach. While there are still plenty of fans of sitting by the hotel pool in a tropical climate, the fundamental reason most people go to the effort of travelling is for discovery.

This is one of the key motivations gamification taps into, so whether you’re a tourism operator, an airline, a hotel, or a local body charged with boosting tourism in your area, creating an online contest or competition could be just the marketing game to grow your social media community, drive traffic to your strategic pages, or even as a catalyst to help people learn more about your destination or attraction. Everyone wants to be a winner, and short of the lottery jackpot, there are few better prizes than a paid-for holiday, or even a luxury experience added on to your stay.

Discovery and curiosity: keys to gamification

Holidays and travel are universally enjoyed and adored. Everyone loves going on holiday, escaping from the responsibilities of day-to-day life, getting to an exotic climate, discovering new cultures, and seeing things they might only see once in their entire lives. When you book a big holiday, or even a city break, it’s most likely planned as being the highlight of your year. It’s an opportunity to go all in and live your best life in every possible aspect.

An online travel competition is a great way to tap into that universal enthusiasm to achieve a variety of marketing purposes. There are various types of online competitions, but fundamentally, it’s an event a business will run where an attractive prize lures people in and encourages them to enter and follow any specific calls to action (CTAs). It’ll run for a specific duration with a hard deadline, and either be a game of chance, like in a prize giveaway, or based on some skill or ability, like with a Photo Contest or some kind of Quiz.

Tap into the playful nature of travellers and tourists

The exact type of online competition you could create depends on a number of factors, such as:

• The nature of your business, whether you’re an airline, a hotelier, or a local body
• The prize you have on offer for the winner, whether it’s a complimentary breakfast, a special experience like a spa day to augment someone’s holiday, a physical premium souvenir, or a holiday in itself
• Your marketing goals, whether it’s to grow your social media following, drive traffic to your strategic pages, to put eyes on a location or attraction, or acquire user-generated content (UGC)

Whether you’re encouraging people to participate in your contest for a chance at free flights or an expenses paid trip, or even just encouraging visitors to your location to discover what you have to offer with a luxury experience giveaway, people looking to travel, particularly those that are already on their trip, will be at their most adventurous and curious, so be more open than normal to take chances to get the most out of their experience. This is why different types of competitions can be so effective in this area.

How to create contests as travel competitions

This is a lot easier than it used to be thanks to gamification platforms like Drimify. With no coding knowledge you can easily customise a varied range of premade game engines to your exact contest needs.

We’ll run through a few examples of travel competitions you could replicate on the Drimify games creation platform. Consider these starting points for your own online travel contests, but bear in mind there are many more game engines in the Drimify catalogue that can easily be customised to whatever contest ideas you can dream up.

1. The instant win contest for mass appeal and participation

You take the Scratch Card, Wheel of Fortune, or Spin the Wheel game engines to create a highly visual instant win experience. Customising the graphics, the copy, and configure the prize distribution (if say, you had smaller prizes and one grand prize) to your exact needs, then you have a professionally made instant win contest to share across social media and in your email newsletters.

Because it’s an instant win game, and only involves the push of a button, running a cursor over the screen, or spinning a virtual wheel, there’s no barrier to entry. If it’s a highly attractive prize, like say, a trip, there’s a huge incentive for people to take part, so with the appropriate marketing support, this could spread far and wide and generate a lot of entries..

Like all the game engines, you can customise the contact screen, where you can ask for personal information and encourage people to opt-in to your newsletter. You can also include pop-ups with videos or extra copy to get more of your messaging into this easy to play contest, and include any relevant CTAs on the end screen.

2. The Photo Contest or Video Contest for user-generated content

The Photo and Video Contests both work by asking users to submit videos or photos, and when customising your competition, you set the parameters or the brief for what sort of media they should submit. For example, let’s say you’re a local body promoting a new hiking trail – you could create a photo contest encouraging users to take pictures on the new hiking trail, with a prize like a skydiving experience or a swimming with sharks experience, or even a romantic meal for 2 serving as the motivation for people to create the best possible compositions they’re able to.

You then validate a shortlist of the best entries, and put out a subsequent Voting Gallery, and invite your audience across your websites, social media, and your newsletters to vote for the best entries.

Because every member of your target audience has, at the least, a modern smartphone capable of taking high quality video, and in most cases even video editing capabilities, this is a highly sophisticated contest that can carry mass appeal. Because everyone is very camera happy on holiday anyway, there’s an element of social cache to entering such a competition. The photos or videos people submit can also be used to promote the contest on social media, and when it’s good, be used in subsequent marketing campaigns too.

3. The themed Quiz to reward holiday makers who embrace the local cultures

Again, discovery is a huge motivator that gamification capitalises on. It’s also a huge motivator in visiting different locations on holiday. By customising a Quiz, you can test and educate a tourist’s knowledge of a region, and reward the best performer with a prize, or enter participants into a prize giveaway.

This is probably the most versatile game engine in the Drimify catalogue and could be used in any number of ways. You could construct questions using audio or video, have answers be multiple choice, open, or ordered, and make them as long, and as difficult (or as short, and as easy) as you like. You could use the Quiz format to also gently educate participants on a particular destination or culture, as well invite them to opt-in to your marketing newsletter. This kind of contest works just as well for targeting people who want to win a holiday as it does for people who are already on a trip.

For example, let’s say you’re a marketer on the tourism board for a tourist destination. You could create a Quiz featuring pictures of local landmarks that they need to identify, as well as questions about the local culture, to test what tourists have learned about the local area. You could distribute the competition via social media, but also have it accessible via QR codes featured in partner hotels lobbies, and in business premises popular with tourists.

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