Embracing Social Innovation: How Sandals Stood Out and Inspired Bookers

With more travel brands turning to social media to capture luxury travellers, competition during peak seasonal moments has intensified, making it harder to stand out. In Q4 2024 and Q1 2025, eight&four chose to push social innovation for their client Sandals - and successfully broke through the noise.

The Approach

In order to drive engagement and maximise impact, the team leveraged TikTok’s Interactive Add-On features to bring two key seasonal sales to life:

Travel Tuesday: A growing moment for travel brands, they used a Gesture Ad prompting users to swipe across the screen to "Unlock Travel Tuesday Deals.”

Jamaica Sale: Through Story Selection, users could choose between two vacation styles in Jamaica, creating a more personalised and immersive experience.

They also teamed up with Blue Robot to launch interactive social campaigns tied to key calendar moments for Sandals.

For Valentine’s Day they introduced the Emoji Engine, a personalised experience where users were invited to comment with 🍴 or 💌 on in-feed posts and Stories to unlock a surprise via DM - bringing the romance of a Sandals getaway to life in a playful and interactive way.

For a Made of Caribbean Event they used Branded Notifications to engage users with a "Send Message" CTA, offering personalised event updates and timely reminders ahead of a TikTok Live broadcast.

Results

The TikTok activity created by eight&four combined to drive over 32,000 add-on clicks, as well as 4500 post engagements and seven million video views.

These TikTok campaigns also managed to drive user action with over 100,000 link clicks to the Sandals website.

The Emoji Engine worked to not only drive more than 50,000 post engagements, but 300+ Emoji Engine responses with a 65% DM response.