Looking to the Future of Business Travel

The Challenge

Crowne Plaza, one of the largest hotel brands in the world, was on a mission to position themselves as the true challenger brand in the heavily-saturated, often-cookie-cutter world of business travel. They asked us to help them truly understand the next generation of business travellers — Millennials whose needs and wants look completely different from the generations that came before them.

The Approach

Understanding the importance of truly seeing a journey instead of talking about it, we used our proprietary mobile ethnography platform, The SoundWave to follow Millennial business travellers from all over the world. Using this technology allowed our respondents to truly take us along on their trips — letting us experience both the small joys and pain points of their business travel along with them. They showed us the very small details in their trips that made them happy — as well as their slight annoyances and frustrations — allowing Crowne Plaza to truly consider every single aspect of the business travel experience.

The Impact

We used the insights from these pocket journeys to help Crowne Plaza craft a new challenger positioning — pushing against the norms of the business travel category to create a truly fresh experience for Millennials. The work quickly went viral throughout the organization, and was held up as the gold standard of how to get to a simple, very actionable insight.