hospitality

InterContinental Hosts Bed-Jumping Event

IHG The InterContinental Hotels Group is doing its first campaign to cross its entire portfolio of hotel brands, from Intercontinental and Crown Plaza to Holiday Inn Express, with top gymnasts jumping on immense beds in different countries to promote a new offer.

 

The company says 20,000 people across the globe leaped onto the 42-foot by 28-foot beds on Thursday as part of the "World's Biggest Bed Jump" to promote the group's "Biggest Free Nights" offer. The events at parks in New York, Shanghai, Paris and London invited people to leap about on the giant beds both to set a record for the world's biggest bed jump and to promote the offer.

The athletes involved are Olympian Shawn Johnson, who won a gold medal for the balance beam and has appeared on "Dancing With the Stars," in New York's Bryant Park; Jiang Yi Qi, last year's World Cup trampoline champ, in Shanghai; Marina Ducroux, a French women's trampoline champ and David Martin, four-time French trampoline champion, leaping at Place de la Defense, Paris; and James Higgins and Jamie Moore for the 2012 British Olympic team, bed jumping at Convent Garden in London.

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The "Biggest Free Nights" offer comprises five million free nights in over 4,000 hotels across 100 countries and seven brands through 2009, per Francie Schul Wolf, VP corporate communications for America.

To get the room, people register at www.getafreenight.com and stay any two nights through July 3 at any InterContinental Hotels & Resorts hotels, including Crowne Plaza, Hotel Indigo, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Staybridge Suites or Candlewood Suites around the world. Consumers can earn up to four free nights.

Schul Wolf tells Marketing Daily that the company handed out flyers at the bed-jumping event and gave free iTunes cards worth 10 song downloads to anyone who jumped. All materials drive consumers to www.worldbiggestbedjump.com and www.getafreenight.com. "On the website there's everything from downloads and videos and photos of people around the world, jumping on the beds; we did a lot ahead of time, reaching out to bloggers."

She says this is the first program of this magnitude from a global perspective, from a brand perspective and also from an event perspective. "The reason we did it this way is that IHC, with 4,200 hotels, is the largest hotel company in the world -- and most people don't know that. If you look at competitors, no one can measure up to what we can do because of the richness of it, because of the offer itself that includes everything from Holiday Inn Express to InterContinental at the top of the scale."

The company is also doing employee video events in all major corporate offices, and the grassroots effort is paired with an ad campaign, via McCann-Erickson using imagery of people jumping on beds.

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