MaineBusiness.com

I have stumbled upon what may be one of the funniest, most effective ad campaigns I’ve ever seen. The Hans Brinker Budget Hotel (www.hans-brinker.com) in Amsterdam is boasting 80% occupancy rates even during seasonal slow months following its “Worst Hotel in the World” campaign, delivered by Amsterdam ad agency KesselsKramer.

The campaign’s hotel ads and images themselves that “promote” the hotel are so bizarrely, side-splittingly funny they can’t help but grab attention. The hotel, which jumps on the Green bandwagon by dubbing itself “Accidentally Eco-Friendly,” offers as illustration images of piecemeal bathing in guestroom sinks, hotel room drapes doubling as bath towels, and the hotel’s new “Eco-Elevator” (a grimy stairway).

The “Before” and “After” pics illustrating guest experiences are a hoot, as are the new “guest amenities” such as “Free Toilet Flushing,” a door and bed for every room, and chairs minus a leg or two that are praised for their “unique design.” Even hotel bugs are given a plug, and pitched as offering guests the boost their immune systems really need to be effective. (“Visit today before it’s too late,” travelers are warned.) The Hans Brinker is even touted as being “similar to hell, but without proper heating.”

The video “Eco-Tour” of the property adds to its perverse appeal, walking viewers through the hotel’s many “eco-friendly” accomplishments: “Leave the towel on the rack: we won’t wash it. Leave the towel on the floor: we still won’t wash it,” intones the soothing Brit narrator in one of the bathroom shots.

Are hotel owners worried about the press clips focusing on the property’s lack of basic amenities and overall “griminess”? If they are, they’re worrying all the way to the bank.

The Hans Brinker itself is fully maximizing the ad campaign, including on its site (www.hans-brinker.com), which seems to focus on the ad campaign more than anything else. “Take a walk down memory lane (watch out for the dogshit) and enjoy the advertising that helped make the Hans Brinker a home away from home to thousands of Amsterdam visitors,” the site advises. If this wouldn’t at least pique the curiosity of surfers, I don’t know what would.

So why has the controversial campaign worked such wonders, and why is it appealing to so many travelers? I wonder if it’s not because the campaign so effectively separates the property from the other hostel-type alternatives throughout the city – even though they all fall, by and large, within the same price point. It makes the idea of a stay memorable, unique, an item of curiosity.

Or, as Dave Bell, a partner with KesselsKramer has observed, “Everybody is always trying to be the best, but there are merits in being the worst. . . . When you’re the worst you have a lot more room to be creative and do your own thing.”

I also posit that among American travelers, it’s the fact that the ads are so completely the antithesis of what we’re used to seeing and reading here in the states. To put it another way, the campaign works by taking “honesty to the extreme,” according to the hotel’s website, and I wonder whether it’s that very frankness that makes travelers at least consider a stay at the property.

I’ve visited Amsterdam several times, and imagine I’ll go again. Amsterdam locals, I imagine, have got to be shaking their heads, puzzled by the lure of the campaign, which admittedly seems geared to the frat house-bachelor party set across the pond.

Nonetheless, the campaign has prompted me to accept the challenge to stay at “The Worst Hotel in the World” on my next trip, at least for one night – out of interest and novelty (and pictures), if nothing else.

I’ll let you know if it’s as unbeatable as the ads claim.