An advertising campaign for a hotel in Amsterdam has proved that honesty is the best policy. When brands are blowing their own trumpets by describing their unique and excellent services, this campaign does the opposite. The hotel claims itself as ‘the worst hotel in the world’, and it has become a huge hit with travelers in the city.
The campaign, by advertising agency KesselsKramer, paints the Hans Brinker budget hotel in Amsterdam as dirty, uncomfortable and lacking basic necessities such as beds.
Now the 650-bed hotel is attracting customers in large numbers and runs at around 80 per cent occupancy even in the low season. The hotel’s success is fully attributed the advertising campaign, which “takes honesty to the extreme” and are “revered and reviled in equal measure”, said the company’s website.
“Here is a hotel where the light bulbs don’t work. A hotel whose showers have less hot water than is standard. Where elevators stay out of order for days. And whose vacuum cleaners’ buttons are rarely switched on,” the hotel says in the YouTube video. In this video, the hotel is making fun of itself as “accidentally eco-friendly’’ because of low energy consumption in the hotel due to inactive cleaning and elevators.
