Mezzino City Breaks

How our PPC strategy generated an 81% increase in direct bookings for a travel accommodation provider

Mezzino City Breaks

About

Mezzino City Breaks is a sub-brand of Mezzino Student Living. They provide summer accommodation across Ireland’s major cities for families, friends or groups on vacation. They do this by using vacant PBSA properties they manage during the academic year, giving tourists an alternative to hotels and private lets and diversifying their own revenue stream.

City Breaks is positioned as a middle ground between expensive traditional hotels and fully self-catered private lets. You get the security, facilities, and location of a high-end hotel mixed with the homely feel and affordability of a private let.

Our Approach

The primary obstacle a brand like Mezzino City Breaks faces in travel and tourism is competition. A market centred on trust and dominated by major competitors is a hard one to penetrate. Big-name brands like Booking.com and Airbnb hold a near-monopoly at both ends of the market.

This forces companies like Mezzino to use these platforms themselves, sacrificing around 20% of their revenue per booking, which, given the current economy, can be unrealistic.

They needed a marketing strategy that would help them enter the market, build a digital footprint for their properties, drive traffic to their native websites, and increase in-house direct bookings.

Our Solution

The travel and tourism industry is built on two foundations: inspiration and research.

Outside the timeless segments of food content and cat videos, social media has seen a huge surge in travel content. Users regularly search for, or come across, travel videos that inspire them about where to go next. Being active in this space was essential for us.

Once they’ve been inspired, they start researching. People predominantly use search engines and generative AI tools to fact-find and explore options. To ensure we got the exposure we wanted, we needed to use these platforms to cut into the research journey early.

Inspiration

We used Meta and Google to build interruptive ad campaigns, targeting people based on our own internal data, demographics and relevant interests. We curated a series of creative ads that highlighted a mix of property, location, and events to simultaneously promote the property and the destination.

We incorporated each building’s USPs while playing directly into hooks around affordability, location, and convenience.

As a sub-brand of Mezzino Student Living, we designed our ad creative in its own style, while keeping elements of the wider brand to ensure consistency and a positive brand association.

Research

To cut in early in the consumer research phase, we used Google to build highly targeted search campaigns that promoted the value proposition to users searching for hotels, private lets, or other alternatives.

We used a keyword strategy focused on higher-value, lower-competition terms, including location-specific phrases, to maximise the value of our reach.

Our ad copy drove clicks by highlighting the selling points of affordability, location, and available facilities. We also leaned into emotional hooks around the experience and convenience of the properties, mixed with storytelling elements about the cities themselves.

The Results

81%
In Direct Bookings
35%
Website Clicks YoY
7.7%
Unique click-through rate