Hotels.com Clay Yourself Contest Concludes; Grand Prize Winner Leonty M. Will Star in a hotels.com Commercial

DALLAS, March 11, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Hotels.com® today announced a winner to the "Clay Yourself " (http://www.clayyourself.com) contest, a contest designed not only for visitors to "audition" to star in a hotels.com commercial, but to create digital clay avatars of themselves. Throughout the contest, over 390,000 people visited clayyourself.com making more than 230,000 clay headshots and voting 1,177,040 times in the eight short weeks of the contest. Over 41,000 headshots were uploaded to Facebook.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20110311/DA63357)

The Grand Prize winner, Leonty M., is a travel enthusiast who lives in Winston-Salem, NC. He entered the contest with a Kelly-green shirt clad, sunglass wearing and headphone equipped clay avatar and won the hearts of fellow voters and the final hotels.com judges. He will travel to Los Angeles in April, to get a behind the scenes view of the commercial creation. During his three day, two night stay, hotels.com has provided Leonty with a complimentary package at a hotel in Los Angeles.

"Leonty's avatar is a fun complement to the cast of clay avatar characters planned for the upcoming hotels.com commercial," said Vic Walia, senior director of North America brand advertising. "Many creative and interesting avatars were created, and seeing imagination shine through the clayyourself.com portal was inspiring."

In addition to the grand prize, eight weekly winners received $200 coupon vouchers for hotels.com. Due to this site's popularity, the microsite will remain active indefinitely even though the commercial audition portion of Clay Yourself is over. Users can still create digital avatars, share them with friends and browse the photo gallery. In addition to the support of the Clay Yourself users, the site won the Favorite Website Awards' "Site of the Day" distinction on February 18th.

Follow Hotels.com on Facebook at www.facebook.com/hotelsdotcom to see the winning clay avatars. For more information, please visit: http://www.clayyourself.com

About hotels.com

Hotels.com® is a leading provider of lodging worldwide, offering more than 130,000 properties in over 60 countries from national chain hotels and all-inclusive resorts to local favorites and bed & breakfasts. Hotels.com is the smarter way to book travel by offering welcomerewards®, an industry leading loyalty rewards program; the real opinions of other travelers captured in over 1.5 million Guest Reviews and; a Price Match Guarantee, so that those booking with hotels.com can be assured they are getting the best deal, either online or by speaking directly to a travel expert at 1-800-2-HOTELS 24 hours a day. For more information, please visit hotels.com. Hotels.com is an operating company of Expedia, Inc. (Nasdaq: EXPE). Follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/hotelsdotcom and Twitter via www.twitter.com/hotelsdotcom or visit the hotels.com Travel Smart Blog for consumer and business travel information. Get clayed at http://www.clayyourself.com. Detailed Hotel Price Index data is available at: http://www.hotel-price-index.com, hotels.com, A Smarter Way to Book™.

Hotels.com and the hotels.com logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of hotels.com, LP. Other logos or products and company names mentioned herein may be the property of their respective owners © 2011 hotels.com, LP. All rights reserved. CST # 2083949-50

SOURCE hotels.com