Posting photos and videos and sharing our daily adventures online has become an integral part of any trip away. This changes the behaviour of visitors to a tourism hot-spot like Vienna. Therefor the Vienna Toursit Board wanted to encourage holidaymakers to experience the city more consciously and to not simply see the sights and highlights through the lens of a smartphone camera. ‘Photograph less, discover more‘ was the motto at the core of an initiative to make tourists and travelers challenge their own behavior while vacationing. Vienna especially is a city where the biggest beauty lies in the appreciation of the smallest of moments: a coffee in imperial surroundings, an intruiging painting in a famous gallery, a piece of music heard in the streets.

The goal was to make people enjoy the city behind the pics more thorougly – without all the filters and hashtags.

Even though smartphones have made our lives much easier in many different ways, they have also changed the way that we discover new places. Today we can stroll through the streets of a picturesque village while sitting in our pajamas on the couch. But these photos seldomly reflect the real appeal of a city. These streets are not filled with individual memories but rather littered with hashtags and diluted by filters. The chase for the best angle or pose has become almost an obsession for many tourists when they stand in front of a breathtaking sight. Instead of exploring or taking in the view they whip out their smartphones and document it to be examined later. Trends like digital detox have shown that in some way, travellers have fallen slaves to their own social media profiles. Vienna - a city of unforgettable moments - thought: It's time to 'unhashtag' your

With 'Unhashtag Vienna' the Vienna Tourist Board launched an initiative to encourage visitors to not only see the city and its highlights through the lens of a smartphone camera. As one of Europe's most visited cities, the streets of Vienna are no exception to crowds of vlogging and posting tourists armed with selfie sticks, always on the hunt for the best angle or the best backgrounds for their Instagram or Facebook stories. So we kicked off the campaign in one of Vienna's most frequented tourist attractions with more than 1,4 million visitors per year. By coining the new term 'unhashtag' as well as by using a big red hashtag as some sort of disruptive element, we invited travellers to enjoy the city behind the pictures and to really SEE Vienna. Not #Vienna.

We drew attention to our campaign with a kick-off at the Viennese Belvedere gallery where we placed an oversized red hashtag over Gustav Klimt’s world-famous painting ‘The Kiss’. Out-of-home flights in Berlin, Hamburg and London, print and social media ads, as well as a purpose-built landingpage invited the public to challenge their own use of Instagram – and social media in general – when travelling. In addition, top Instagrammers from the United Kingdom and Germany were invited to Vienna for a bit of digital detox. We supplied them with analog Lomo cameras, containing only 10 pictures. In their blogs they described their experiences while enjoying Vienna. Not #Vienna. Almost ironically, the travel bloggers and the installation at the Belvedere sparked a vivid online debate about the benefits of going offline while on vacation and more conscious ways of experiencing our travel destinations.

Austrian and international media used the initiative to start a discussion about the impact of smartphones on holidaymakers and destinations, among them leading networks and news outlets such as The Times, the BBC, the London Evening Standard or Die Zeit. Numerous social media users joined in, talking passionately about their ideal holiday using - of all things - #UnhashtagVienna to exchange their thoughts. Overall, 'Unhashtag Vienna' hit a nerve among online communities and reached over 5,8 million Social Media Impressions as well as more that 260 million Media Impressions. The campaign was called “a brave move in the age of social media” and achieved its goal to fuel a global discussion about a considerate use of smartphones while on vacation.