-- Innovative campaigns drive impactful results for Brand USA, Accor, Air France, TCA Abu Dhabi, and Qatar Airways

BERLIN, March 6, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Expedia® Media Solutions, the advertising division of the Expedia group, announced the recipients of its 2013 EMEA Partner Awards at ITB Berlin, the world's leading travel trade show. The annual EMEA Partner Awards are part of Expedia Media Solutions' global awards program which recognizes original and groundbreaking campaigns with exemplary innovation and success in digital marketing and advertising.

Expedia Media Solutions consults with its partners to develop campaigns that effectively leverage the Expedia group platform and vast partner network. By tapping into Expedia Media Solutions' expertise and reach, marketers can create cross-brand campaigns that use innovative tactics and drive impressive results like those demonstrated by this year's EMEA Partner Awards recipients.

"Our consultative approach allows us to build innovative partner campaigns that reach targeted audiences and generate striking results as demonstrated by this year's award recipients," said Noah Tratt, global vice president, Expedia Media Solutions. "The success of a campaign begins when our digital marketing consultants work with partners to identify the best opportunities available through Expedia's robust network based on their brand goals."

The annual awards program recognizes campaigns across five categories including "Global Partner of the Year," a new addition for 2013. The winners include:

2013 Global Partner of the Year: Brand USA

Brand USA, the country's destination marketing organization, turned to Expedia Media Solutions to increase international visitation to the United States, grow the country's share of the global travel market and create new American jobs through a boost in tourism dollars. Through a partnership and year-long campaign, Brand USA was able to leverage the Expedia group's global network and provide travel brands with innovative ways to maximize their visibility and budget, including brand co-operative campaigns with advertisers, onsite brand campaigns and offsite co-invested brand marketing campaigns. In total, 26 custom "Discover America" microsites were created in nine languages across 22 points of sale, 72 co-op brand advertising campaigns were carried out, and a media match program was implemented to unify state and regional destinations under a national umbrella. The co-operative campaigns delivered excellent results for advertisers, Brand USA and Expedia, including 144 million combined impressions, an 18 percent increase in passenger and hotel bookings and a 19 percent increase in revenue to the U.S. achieved through the branded microsites.

2013 EMEA Hotel Campaign of the Year: Accor

For the second consecutive year, Accor, the world's leading hotel operator and market leader in Europe, was awarded EMEA Hotel Campaign of the Year. The summer 2013 campaign was designed to effectively promote Accor's worldwide hotel properties. Working with Accor, Expedia Media Solutions implemented a campaign featuring image-rich creative and custom pages on 11 Expedia group points of sale, including Hotels.com Russia, Hotels.com Arabic, and Hotels.com Brazil. It also incorporated highly visual and inspirational content that was published across Expedia's Facebook, Google+ and Twitter pages to encourage social media engagement. Following the success of the award-winning 2012 campaign, the 2013 campaign once again delivered strong results for Accor, with a 4:1 return on investment (ROI), 16.4: 1 return on ad spend (ROAS), and a 19 percent year-over-year gross bookings increase.

2013 EMEA Airline Campaign of the Year: Air France

The Transatlantic Joint Venture of Air France, KLM and Delta partnered with Expedia Media Solutions to build awareness for the United States in Germany and increase the Joint Venture's market share on routes to the U.S. from Germany. Expedia Media Solutions leveraged its Brand USA partnership to tap into "Discover America," a program that allows advertisers working with the Expedia group to maximize their ad budget and exposure through a media spend match, which provided the airlines of the Joint Venture with a unique opportunity to effectively reach the German audience. Hosted on Expedia's German point of sale, www.expedia.de, the campaign highlighted a single destination – USA – and linked consumers directly to the Brand USA microsite on Expedia. The Brand USA joint campaign generated excellent results in Germany, including an increase in market share for the Transatlantic Joint Venture of Air France, KLM and Delta to the U.S. from just over 18 percent to nearly 25 percent year-over-year. The number of passengers who booked a flight with the Joint Venture to the U.S. and year-over-year gross bookings went up by 64 percent and 58 percent respectively.

2013 EMEA Destination Campaign of the Year: TCA Abu Dhabi

TCA Abu Dhabi and Expedia Media Solutions worked together to develop an integrated online and offline campaign that positioned Abu Dhabi as the next holiday destination for UK travelers. The campaign included digital ads on the Expedia UK website, a social media competition offering a holiday vacation package to Abu Dhabi and a two-week co-branded visual campaign in the London Tube and Rail Network. In just two months, the campaign delivered strong results, including a 4:1 ROI. The performance was equally notable during the course of the yearlong campaign and exceeded the goal of generating a 17 percent year-over-year increase for TCA Abu Dhabi. Passenger bookings to Abu Dhabi on Expedia UK grew more than 27 percent year-over-year, for a total increase of 10 percent in market share against direct competitor destinations.

2013 EMEA Most Innovative Campaign of the Year: Qatar Airways

As one of the fastest growing airlines in the world, Qatar Airways wanted to utilize social media to build awareness with customers and engage with travelers in three distinct regions – the UK, United States and Germany. Working with Expedia Media Solutions, Qatar Airways created 'Fly Your Own Way' a Facebook app-based contest campaign hosted on Expedia's international Facebook pages. The app prompted users to select a destination, travel partner and favorite in-flight activity and then compiled a specific travel personality and digital boarding pass – both required to enter the competition. By playing the game, travelers had the opportunity to win a luxury round-trip business class ticket anywhere in the world. This is the first time Expedia Media Solutions created a custom 'Fly Your Own Way' app that enables users to experience, engage and interact with a brand through social media and it generated an impressive 89,000,000 social impressions. In just two months, the Qatar application itself had more than 25,500 entries including 22,000 that were driven directly from Facebook.

About Expedia Media Solutions

Formed in 2007, Expedia Media Solutions is dedicated to building online and offline media partnerships for travel and non-travel brand advertisers and to enable them to leverage the unique media value of Expedia's network of leading travel brands and global points of sale. For more information, visit www.advertising.expedia.com.

About The Expedia group

The Expedia group is the largest travel company in the world, with an extensive brand portfolio that includes some of the world's leading online travel brands, including:

• Expedia.com®, the world's largest full service online travel agency, with localized sites in 31 countries
• Hotels.com®, the hotel specialist with sites in more than 60 countries
• Hotwire®, a leading discount travel site that offers opaque deals in 12 countries throughout North America, Europe and Asia
• Egencia®, the world's fifth largest corporate travel management company
• eLong™, the second largest online travel company in China 
• Venere.com™, the online hotel reservation specialist in Europe
• trivago®, a leading hotel metasearch company with sites in 40 countries
• Expedia Local Expert®,  a provider of in-market concierge services, activities and experiences in 18 markets worldwide
• Classic Vacations®, a top luxury travel specialist
• Expedia® CruiseShipCenters®, one of North America's leading retail cruise vacation experts

The company delivers consumers value in leisure and business travel, drives incremental demand and direct bookings to travel suppliers, and provides advertisers the opportunity to reach a highly valuable audience of in-market travel consumers through Expedia Media Solutions. Expedia also powers bookings for some of the world's leading airlines and hotels, top consumer brands, high traffic websites, and thousands of active affiliates through Expedia® Affiliate Network. (NASDAQ: EXPE) For corporate and industry news and views, visit us at www.expediainc.com or follow us on Twitter @expediainc.

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