HotwireCopied

Hotwire, the Expedia-owned discount travel site launched in 2000, unveiled a new brand on 2 June 2014. The announcement bundled a new logo with the tagline Hotels. Deals. Happiness., two TV campaigns created by the Santa Monica agency Tiny Rebellion, one of them directed by the documentarian Errol Morris, and a re-skin of the website and the iOS and Android apps.

Hotwire Group president Henrik Kjellberg said the goal was to bring customers' positive booking experiences to life and show how travellers feel when they realise they have saved up to 60 percent. The release presented the whole brand as centred on the happiness of scoring a deal, and positioned the ads against other, more gimmicky spots.

The logo itself got a less cheerful reception. At the end of 2014 Business Insider's Maya Kosoff put it in a roundup of the worst tech logo changes of all time, alongside Airbnb, Yahoo and Bing. Her description was blunt: the old logo, logically for a travel booking company, included an airplane motif, and the new one replaced the airplane with just a red dot.

That one-line verdict is hard to argue with. Hotwire's new tagline led with hotels, so dropping the airplane had some logic. But a red dot says neither travel nor deals. The release talked about happiness and the ads leaned on real travellers and a famous documentarian; the mark itself went the other way, toward anonymity.