Sol Meliá, Palma de Mallorca, Spain, has hit on a viral marketing campaign that leverages the Google Earth application. Using Google satellite images, visitors to solmelia.com are challenged to pinpoint the exact location of all of Sol Meliá’s 400 hotels, with the chance to win free hotel nights. The game—known as Escape and available in seven languages—allows players to circle the world via satellite by virtually hopping from hotel to hotel.

After the first six weeks of the contest, which launched in December, more than 180,000 users had participated, with nearly half of them having found the game through personal references. One especially enthusiastic player has played at least 92 times, says Antonio Batanero, Sol Meliá’s global online marketing director.

“The primary goal was to show our customers and potential customers the ideal locations of Sol Meliá’s hotels and resorts, particularly in terms of their proximity to the beach, urban locations, shopping areas and other points of interest,” Batanero says.

Creating the game came with some problems, however. Latitudes and longitudes of each property had to be uploaded manually; the company had never actually verified these locations before, and inexact coordinates had hotels located in the middle of the ocean, Batanero says. With the coordinates corrected, however, Sol Meliá is now adapting Escape to global positioning systems and various Web 2.0 applications.