Objectives

The Caribbean boasts some of the most beautiful beaches in the world and is one of our primary vacation markets. However, when devastating Hurricanes, Irma and Maria, wreaked havoc across the Caribbean, their primary source of income was jeopardized. The Caribbean region relies on the tourism industry to maintain a sustainable community for its residents. With the destruction of many tourism resources, CheapCaribbean saw an urgent need to help our Caribbean partners in the recovery process. We sought to provide awareness on the distress our beloved islands were facing by educating our customers, as well as raise funds to make an impact for the residents as quickly and effectively as possible with our limited resources.

Strategy and Execution

Within a few days of Hurricane Irma's landfall, CheapCaribbean established and implemented an integrated fundraising campaign to help the affected Caribbean islands. We identified the charity we would support with our efforts, Tourism Cares, a non-profit benefitting the Caribbean Hotel & Tourism Association. Since our focus is to provide outstanding beach vacations to the Caribbean region, it was heartbreaking to see and hear about the devastation of these destinations, first-hand. We quickly established two priorities with this campaign: informing/educating our customers and assisting with the recovery efforts of the impacted islands. The "We Love You, Caribbean" campaign included emails, social media posts, blogs, public relations, site placements and internal communications. We crafted a video from our President, highlighting the affected islands, their current state and the details of our campaign, while displaying our concern and compassion for our destination and resort partners. With the "We Love You, Caribbean" campaign, CheapCaribbean donated $58K:

• 50% of profit from bookings made on September 22, 2017
• 20% of proceeds from bookings of the Rum Tour package
• Proceeds from custom-made t-shirt sales and customer donations

The campaign also involved:

• Going silent on all social channels with the exception of this campaign
• Pausing sales emails and messaging to make hurricane relief our core objective
• Blogs about our campaign, the state of the islands and alternative destinations for vacations
• A segmented email campaign including our initial send of 1M to the full database and also targeted communication to three different segments (customers whose bookings were located in affected destinations, customers whose booking were outside of affected destination, and the remaining customers in our database)
• Internal communication on our campaign and how to get involved
• Responding to media and pitching our campaign
• Negotiating t-shirts at wholesale cost and launching a customer facing store to sell shirts and collect donations

Within a few days of launching "We Love You, Caribbean," Hurricane Maria hit, further devastating the Caribbean. Our team responded quickly, solidifying our commitment to help all hurricane-impacted islands. We knew our efforts were enhanced because the devastation impacted even more communities, destinations and resort partners.

Results

We far exceeded our objectives for the "We Love You, Caribbean" campaign; educating our customers and assisting in the recovery of the impacted islands. Not only were we able to contribute over $58K to Tourism Cares, but we serviced/re-booked 3K travelers in destination or with future travel dates to ensure they were able to still have their desired vacation experience. This campaign also garnered PR coverage from top outlets like Washington Post, Huffington Post, MSN, Thrillist, New York Daily News and positioned us as experts on the Caribbean tourism industry. The response from our social following and customers was overwhelmingly positive further confirming our success with this campaign. This was our first time running a CSR campaign and we, not only far exceeded our goals, but are so thankful to have been able to help the beach communities in need. Results included (but not limited to): 791 shirts sold, contributing $11,865 to total donation 2nd highest views on an organic YouTube video 333% increase in Facebook video views, 795% increase in social media engagements compared to 2018 CSR campaign 10 feature articles and 39 mentions reaching 169M people with an ad value of $367K We continue to seek opportunities to assist the impacted destinations and work closely with organizations whose core purpose is the recovery of the Caribbean.

Media

Video for We Love You, Caribbean