Motel 6 has announced the winners of its Open Road Correspondents contest. Meet Dan Bakst of Temple Terrance, Fla., who will travel Route 66 in the coming weeks:
According to the motel chain, Bakst and the other two correspondents will travel “green” in environmentally friendly vehicles and digital map applications to help conserve fuel. The winners also will receive two souped-up iPads. The prize package for each winner is worth about $6,000.
Bakst will travel Route 66 from Amarillo, Texas, to Santa Monica, Calif. His journey will be between July 16 and Sept. 3. The correspondents will document their trip with status updates and photos on their own social media profiles and on Motel 6’s Facebook and Twitter accounts.
The other two winners — Keaton Davis and Brianna Poster — will travel about 1,000-mile stretches of the Pacific Coast Highway and Southern Route, respectively.
Bakst will sort of have a glass-half-full, glass-half-empty situation during his trip. He’ll provide nice publicity for the Mother Road with his reports. On the other hand, he and his readers will miss out on Route 66’s wonderful mom-and-pop motels because he’s required to stay at Motel 6s.
Not only will he miss out on the great Mom & Pop motels, but he is missing half the Route!! What about Illinois, Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma? Isn’t Motel 6 aware that Route 66 goes thru there as well? I know there are Motel 6’s along the route in those states as well. Sad to see only half of it done.
To be fair, all three road trips were just 1,000 miles.
“The correspondents will document their trip with status updates and photos on their own social media profiles and on Motel 6′s Facebook and Twitter accounts.”
Too bad they’ve chosen to limit the exposure by ONLY providing coverage via social media sites. I’ve never participated in those, and never will. While very popular, there are still more people NOT on Facebook than are on it.
Indeed. There are plenty of ways that the information and images gathered on such a trip could have been brought to a wider audience.
It’s likely that relatively few would bother viewing a self-promotional page on a social media site, compared to the number of people who would see the images if they were released under a free licence (such as Creative Commons ‘by’ or ‘by-share alike’) so that they could be posted to Flickr or Wikipedia. Another option would be to cover the entire eight-state route (instead of just a 1000-mile section) and publish a book of images.
Of the four or five hundred notable landmarks on US 66, http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Buildings_and_structures_on_U.S._Route_66 only has about eighty actual articles. Many key sites which do meet the criteria for inclusion (with significant coverage in multiple reliable sources) aren’t listed despite having professionally-edited descriptions in print in books or news articles about the old US highway. Many more are missing free images; the inability to find photos that aren’t copyrighted to depict sites like http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/John%27s_Modern_Cabins (for instance) is unfortunate as those sites won’t be there forever. As the sixth-largest site on the web (by Alexa traffic), Wikipedia could reach a wide audience if only every place that was notable enough to be in the various Route 66 books had a wiki page (citing the books as reliable sources) and a photograph or two to bring these landmarks to armchair travellers worldwide. The same might not be true of an individual social media page.
To send someone on a trip like this and make a printed book might be a little more difficult… that would usually mean covering the whole route (not just “1000 miles and no independent motels”) and finding a publisher for a topic on which there are already several good books to be had.
Nonetheless, I’m just not sure if driving 1000 miles just to create a Facebook page is going to reach a wide enough audience to make a difference.
For that matter… a video DVD can easily run two hours, a Twitter message is limited to 140 characters. Odd choice of medium?
I agree. I’m not on any of the social media sites. I have enough friends that I am in communication with via emails….that keeps me busy enough!
By only covering 1000 of 2448 miles (west of Amarillo) and missing the mum-and-pop motels, the result could well be less complete than the Disney version of US 66 (the “Cars” research trips ran from before Baxter Springs KS to almost Peach Springs AZ).
Cozy Cone Motel? On the route (Wigwam in Holbrook AZ) but skipped as this is a Motel 6 promo. That really cute blue Porsche? Missed entirely (as Dawn Welch of Rock Café, Stroud OK) along with the rest of Oklahoma, including Cars “Sheriff” Michael Wallis (who lives in Tulsa).
Flo and Ramone? Texas is half-included. Flo (as Fran Houser, semi-retired from Adrian TX’s Midpoint Café) is included near the start of the route instead of being the midpoint, Ramone’s (U-Drop Inn and Tower Station, Shamrock TX) is missed entirely as this starts in Amarillo (home of Tex, a long-horned Cadillac likely spotted at the Big Texan Steak Ranch). The Cadillac Ranch) is the other Amarillo cartoon reference; all of these Cadillacs might not fit this promotion’s greenwashing agenda as they are big automobiles with a big appetite for tasty barrels of West Texas Intermediate?
Mater? He’s a Kansas boy (the walking backwards bit is from Dean Walker of the Kansas Route 66 association, the truck itself was spotted in Galena) so again missed.
Luigi’s leaning tower of tires? If this is the leaning water tower in Groom TX, again, missed…
At least they’ll get to see the “HERE IT IS” sign on a souvenir stand in Arizona, but they will miss a lot.
CarlB, I covered all of those “Cars” inspirations years ago:
https://www.route66news.com/2006/06/09/a-route-66-guide-to-the-cars-movie/
But even just 1,000 miles of Route 66 is pretty rich in attractions, history, and oddities. I’m not as inclined to be as dismissive of it, and ought to give this fellow a chance. We’ll see what he tweets and posts along the way.
Kudos to Motel 6 for doing this, (I think), however it is obviously a publicity $tunt. Social Media is about the exact opposite of what route 66 should be: freedom unplugged. Okay, they are a big business, I get it so they are bound to get things wrong. And many of those shots in the video trailer look like I-40 to me. Just sayin’.