Cesar (Mars) — Cesar x Tripadvisor: Dog Friendly Travel
PLATINUM — 2026 Marketing Makes a World of Difference™ Awards
Cesar partnered with Tripadvisor to make dog-friendly travel easier to discover, plan and experience—while encouraging more businesses to welcome dogs.
Submitted by EssenceMediacom
Winner’s Citation
For turning a brand belief into a useful travel ecosystem—helping pet parents more easily plan experiences with their dogs while encouraging hotels, restaurants and other businesses to become more dog friendly.
How It Makes a World of Difference
For a growing number of people, a dog isn’t something to leave behind when life happens. It’s part of the family.
Travel, however, hasn’t always caught up.
While 73% of Tripadvisor users own pets, fewer than 1% of U.S. restaurants were listed as pet friendly before the campaign. Finding hotels, restaurants and attractions that would welcome a dog could turn planning a trip into a surprisingly complicated exercise.
Cesar saw an opportunity to do something more useful than simply celebrate the bond between people and their pets.
Working with Tripadvisor, the brand helped create the platform’s first dedicated dog-friendly travel hub. It included an AI-powered Trip Builder capable of creating personalized pet-friendly itineraries, curated city guides, travel advice and resources for finding dog-friendly places. Tripadvisor also introduced a new Travelers’ Choice Best of the Best recognition for Pet-Friendly Hotels.
But the partnership addressed the other side of the equation too.
A dedicated business hub helped venues understand the opportunity in welcoming dogs, while cultural activations—including the first Cesar Restaurant Weekend for Dogs—brought the idea into the physical world.
In other words, Cesar wasn’t only helping dog owners find the places that already welcomed them.
It was helping create more of those places.
The Difference Marketing Made
Marketing didn’t simply tell people that Cesar supported dog-friendly travel. It helped make dog-friendly travel easier to do.
That distinction is what elevates the initiative.
The partnership connected Cesar’s belief that dogs belong in more parts of people’s lives with Tripadvisor’s ability to influence how people plan and experience travel.
Technology helped remove some of the friction from planning. Content helped people discover possibilities. Tripadvisor’s platform provided credibility and scale. And outreach to businesses helped expand the supply of places prepared to welcome dogs.
What began as a marketing partnership therefore operated on both sides of the experience: helping travelers find a more dog-friendly world while encouraging businesses to help create one.
That’s a larger role for marketing than simply attaching Cesar to the idea of traveling with pets.
It made the idea more possible.
Results That Make a Difference
The dog-friendly travel hub attracted 5 million pet parents, with more than 400,000 trips planned, while the wider initiative generated 790 million earned impressions.
There were strong brand and business results as well. Independent studies reported an 11% increase in brand awareness and 50% higher consideration among non-Cesar users. Among next-generation pet parents, consideration reached 67%, 18% above the control group. Amazon sales of Cesar’s new “on the go” product increased 14%.
But for MMWD, perhaps the most revealing result happened beyond the Cesar brand itself.
Tripadvisor added 5,000 new pet-friendly accreditations, increasing pet-friendly listings by 16% for restaurants and 18% for hotels.
That means the initiative didn’t merely generate attention around dog-friendly travel. The ecosystem itself became more dog friendly.
And that may be the clearest measure of the difference marketing made.
Something changed for people because marketing got involved: taking the dog along became a little easier.
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