Bing Travel partnered with Cincinnati Bengals linebacker Dhani Jones to provide travel trips and to promote the service.
Does it fumble the celebrity partnership or do an effective job?
The NFL star, who co-authored the book, The Sportsman: Unexpected Lessons from an Around-the-World Sports Odyssey, provided Bing Travel with his 10 Favorite Places (from Russia to New Zealand) and Travel Wish List (Israel, Turkey, Philippines etc.), and submitted to a Q&A: Traveling the World with Dhani Jones.
The 10 Favorite Places slideshow has a social media tie-in. You can add one or all of the 10 destinations to the Bing Travel Wish List on Facebook app.
Then there's a three-part series of YouTube videos, Travel Tips with Dhani Jones, replete with some nice destination clips. For example, here's part one:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQvrcMF8oo
Uploaded to YouTube some time July 19, part one had three views as of this writing.
As outlined in Bing's Travel blog, Bing then gets highly self-promotional.
"We asked Dhani to share his favoirte Bing Travel tools that can help you make your travel dreams into a reality..." according to the blog.
Paraphrasing the linebacker, these are Jones' favorite Bing Travel tools:
- Searching on Bing ("Stop searching and start finding")
- Bing's hotel rate indicator, and
- Connecting to Bing through Facebook to see which friends live in a particular destination.
A very convenient and not-so-original list.
So, it's a trendy marketing strategy for a company to partner with a celebrity and to use that person's renown to drive traffic.
Bing's effort with Jones on the surface has all of the seemingly required efforts -- a celebrity name, a destination slide show, video clips with Jones on YouTube featuring inspiring destination images, and integration with a Bing Facebook app.
How good -- or bad -- a job has Bing Travel done so far with its Dhani Jones partnership?
Is it a model for other travel companies to follow or are there some shortcomings?