The 'Hotel of Your Dreams'

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Sunscape Puerto Plata

A tipster sent a shiny little pearl our way earlier this week that we’d like to share with you: behold, campaign by Barcelo (a brand you may recognize from our and coverage). They’re gearing up to open a hotel in Mexico, the design of which (they’d like you to think) requires your participation.

You see, as the chain gets their luxury Los Cabos Palace Deluxe property all set for its December 1st opening, you (the soon-to-be-guest) are invited to help shape the hotel’s design and amenity offerings by submitting your ideas of a “dream hotel” over at TheHotelOfYourDreams.com. Whether or not any of these “dreams” will be incorporated into the new hotel is unclear — we imagine not, since the opening’s only a few months out and the property’s Facebook page seems to have some pretty detailed renderings and plans already — but it’s a cool marketing campaign.

The flash-based site has been super cranky and unreliable over the last few days, but we do want to mention that we caught a glimpse of one user’s response that dreams of a hotel room — with the continuous sound of a beating heart to complete the inside-a-body feel of the place. Okay then. We hope to never encounter anything like that ever, but maybe that’s just us. Moving on.

Here’s what really caught our eye about this campaign: the crafty Barcelo folks seem to be outsourcing their marketing to you. Yes, you — the guest who is responsible for submitting creative ideas and voicing your desires — are also responsible for marketing the hotel, mostly through Twitter. Hmmm. But! You get paid for doing the marketing. Well, kinda.

See, the hotel is offering incentives to people who spread the word about the opening (and the concept) prior to its opening; that is, you can score discounts (in increments of 5%, up to 20% total) by doing the following:

Inviting another user or “friend” to the site via the “send to friend” mechanism offered on the siteTweeting” the site on Twitter by clicking the “tweet it!” link, whereby the user will be asked to log in to their Twitter profile and the tweet will appearCommenting or “tweeting” on Twitter about the siteMarking one of the characters’ tweets as a favourite

You can see the full details here, though there are some pretty important specifics missing. Here’s what we know: the hotel opens on December 1st. Discounts are available if you do this Twitter marketing-ish stuff for them. There are “swim-up suites” involved.

We can’t help but feel like they’re trying to cheat the social media “system”, though. Like, we clicked the “Tweet It” button on the Hotel of Your Dreams site and a ready-made Tweet was dropped right into our text input box on Twitter: A bit too much, maybe? We like it, we don’t LOVE it. Are we supposed to be skeptical of every “LOVE this” we see on our Twitter feed now? Oy.