St Giles lets their guests tell virtual-reality stories
Videos highlight adventures, experiences at attractions near chain’s worldwide properties
St Giles Hotels, a boutique chain of nine independently managed hotels across Asia, Australia, Europe and North America, has launched a new virtual-reality campaign to inspire global travel and showcase the ideal, central locations of each of its properties.
Rather than featuring the services and facilities of each hotel, the user-generated campaign called St Giles 360 encourages guests to highlight their own travel adventures and unique experiences at nearby attractions with virtual-reality videos.
Through the St Giles Hotels mobile app and microsite, hotel guests and socialmedia personalities bring viewers on a journey across the sights and sounds of cities they inhabit and travel, including locales in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Philippines and Malaysia.
St Giles Hotels is the first hospitality brand to use guest-generated virtualreality content to connect its guests with enriching travel experiences steps away from its properties.
“One of our aims was to create something that our guests and viewers could have a little fun with, something interactive, engaging and cool that anyone could watch a few times over to capture the 360 experience,” said Abigail Tan, head of St Giles U.S.A, U.K. and Europe. “Our guests inspire us every day, and this campaign enables us to connect with them, as well as for them to connect with each other.”
The hotel issued an open casting call and provided its guests and social-media influencers across four continents with Samsung 360 Gear cameras to capture their travels, which are hosted on the St Giles 360 microsite, stgiles360.com.
Through these virtual-reality videos, viewers see iconic sites, including the London Eye and Windsor Castle in U.K., the Kek Lok Si Temple and Penang Hill in Penang, Malaysia, and the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur. Viewers also experience what it’s like to take a yellow taxi cab in New York City to visit the Top of the Rock and enjoy a day of surfing in Sydney, Australia.
There are a series of promotions across all St Giles properties to celebrate the campaign, including various perks, special packages and complimentary cityspecific experiences located near each hotel.
Guests booking any of the 360-themed offers throughout 2017 will be entered for a chance to win an international getaway to all properties in the St Giles Hotels portfolio on a 15-night trip (three nights per city) and a $5,000 (U.S.) gift card towards air travel. Denise Dias is a Toronto writer.