trivago

Challenge

The leading global hotel price comparison website, trivago, enables travellers to easily find, compare and choose where to stay and when to go, for a great price.

Despite strong brand awareness, trivago operates in a highly competitive industry and so their ambition was to strengthen their brand and improve their distinctiveness and adoption in the market. To do so, they needed our help in refreshing their brand identity to create a more defined and memorable experience for trivago’s users.

Brand Strategy

Our strategy aimed to clarify the brand proposition and messaging, ensuring people have a clear reason to choose trivago, but also come back. At the heart of this, is a single-minded promise that captures the power of trivago’s metasearch capabilities, and the benefit it provides users. ‘Search savvy. Feel super.’ solidifies trivago’s role as users short-cut to a great hotel deal and reintroduces some of the unique and charming spirit of the brand that made trivago successful. To guide the transformation, three experience principles define how trivago shows up in the world.

“ We wanted to capture that sense of achievement you feel when you get a good deal. 'Feel super' flexes well to speak to those high-energy wins, as well as reassurance and peace of mind.”

Maddy Patterson,
Strategist at DesignStudio

Brand identity

The brand promise comes to life through the visual identity. Our bold logo is the beacon of the brand and includes the ‘t’ shorthand which is made up of a checkmark to represent ‘Search savvy’, and a smile which reflects the trivago experience making travellers ‘Feel super’. This is supported by a customised font – named Savvy Grotesk – created in partnership with Studio Feixen. A contemporary and characterful typeface, it supports several hundred languages, enabling trivago to communicate with its audiences across the world.

“Our goal was to create a simple design system that heroes our warm & witty tone of voice. Hank can play a key role in this by welcoming and guiding users through the customer journey.”

Diane Dear
Senior Designer at DesignStudio

“As we give our brand a fresh look, we're building up on the concepts that made trivago a strong global brand. It's a mix of where we've been and where we're headed. This isn't just an aesthetic upgrade; it's our way of standing out in the competitive travel market, making sure we cut through the noise.”

Jasmine Ezz,
CMO at trivago

Brand expression

A central feature of the brand is a distinctive tone of voice that is warm and inviting. We used key voice principles to ensure trivago always speaks in a way that is assured and upbeat, unfussy and uncomplicated and witty and relatable to attract and engage its diverse global audience.

The witty and characterful nature of the brand is brought to life through playful hand-drawn illustrations, created in partnership with Niceshit. The illustrative scenes are inspired by the trivago persona, Hank – a simple yet lovable door-hanger character. Hank adds further personality into the experience and welcomes, guides, inspires and informs users through their search and comparison journey.

The illustration is complemented by photography that captures the feeling of finding a great deal and is used to tell stories, inspire travellers and highlight trivago’s benefits.

Following the rebrand, trivago is starting to see positive results with growth in branded traffic and substantially higher conversion rates in Q1 of 2024.