Press Pages Bizcommunity — #OrchidsandOnions: Lekkeslaap gives us a lekker ad

To be honest, I cannot remember what we used to do, as a family, in the pre-internet times, when it came to going on holiday and arranging accommodation. Somehow, we found places - from chalets to beachfront apartments, to camp sites...which we managed to book and pay for without any digital assistance.

These days, if we are planning to go somewhere and want to weigh up the accommodation options, it’s simply a matter of going online and going through the various portals – Air BnB, booking.com (generally for overseas trips, few and far between though they may be these days) as well as lekkeslaap.co.za or safarinow.com for local places.

Viral ad

We’ve booked places on all of them and, surprisingly in this day and age of consumer disappointment, we’ve had pretty good experiences…and mostly fuss-free dealings with refunds (as we had to do with Air BnB over the pandemic).

Lekkeslaap, though, offers a particularly local offering and is one of our first ports of call when we’re are looking for an overnight stay to or from the coast in SA.

And they do have a wide offering, something which is emphasised in their latest video ad (you have to call them that these days, because these productions are no longer restricted just to the conventional TV channels). This one I have seen on TV as well as my new addiction, YouTube, and it has garnered enough views that it is also being shared virally. That will tell you that it has tickled the fancy of many.

It opens to two men sitting “oppie stoep” with koffie. They marvel that this is lekker (helpfully translated in the YouTube sub-titles as “nice” and blerry lekker(blerry nice). The conversation is all in Afrikaans but so simplified that even we linguistically lazy souties can get the picture.

One says to the other that they spent a weekend at a very nice place. But he can’t seem to remember where it was. So he tries to get his companion to jog his memory, asking him the name of the flower with thorns. That’s a Rose, he says eventually, in English.

Ja, daar’s hy. Rose! The first man shouts, where were we last weekend?

He won’t have been the first to forget his wife’s name…

It’s a funny gag but also gels with the punchline that Lekkeslaap promises that it has plenty of “mostly memorable” places on its site.

It gets an Orchid for its humour but also because it keeps the message simple.