Fairmont Launches ‘Original' Interactive Site

Taking cues from the soaring popularity of social media, Fairmont Hotels & Resorts is launching a new interactive Web site that melds all sorts of user-generated content with materials created and contributed from staff across the Fairmont portfolio.Currently in a soft-launch phase, EverybodysAnOriginal.com invites consumers to upload photos, videos and commentary about Fairmont hotels and their holiday experiences. Meanwhile, the individual Fairmont properties are similarly encouraged to contribute media and information, along with specialty recipes, and to respond to and interact with guest users.

Simply put, the media-heavy site is like a really deep, easily navigable and wholly customized Facebook page for the entire Fairmont family of hotels.

“The Fairmont brand lends itself to memory-making, so we wanted to create a vehicle that lets our guests tell their stories about their stays with us,” says Dave Doucette, Fairmont’s director of Internet strategy. “It’s creating ways for our existing guests to connect with the brand in a more meaningful way.”

To seed the site with content, Fairmont linked relevant media from Flickr and YouTube and also sent Flip video cameras to each hotel and encouraged staff to start filming. Additionally, there is plenty of interesting information, fun facts and “behind-the-scenes” media that isn’t a good fit for the standard Fairmont.com site that some guests might still find interesting-Web outtakes, if you will. EveryonesAnOriginal.com will act as a repository for that sort of stuff.

While Fairmont does have a team in place to monitor uploaded content for relevancy, redundancy and family-friendliness, Doucette says censorship of content will be minimal. Within reason, negative comments will remain. “It just wouldn’t be authentic if we started filtering negative comments off the Web site,” he says. That said, the site is intended to be more of a hub for sharing Fairmont experiences and extending the brand’s messaging than a TripAdvisor-style review site.