Axel Hotels Rewrites History With Its Columbus Campaign
Axel Hotels' Columbus campaign is a 2019 Spanish hospitality film that reframes Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas as a meditation on respect, fraternity, and love, released under the brand's NSFW Collection to coincide with the opening of AxelBeach Miami.
Axel Hotels announced the campaign on 17 June 2019 via its official blog, as documented on axelmag.com. The film, classified under the hospitality and tourism industry, carries the hashtag #ColumbusByAxel and was built around a single cinematic media asset — a short film that collapses centuries of history into a contemporary statement about human connection. Its tagline sets the premise plainly: more than 500 years ago, a navigator crossed the ocean in front of three ships, manned by the toughest men. The campaign's core message, as reported by axelmag.com, is Cambiemos el odio por amor — Let's change hate for love.
In Spain, where Axel Hotels was founded and where the brand's identity as the world's first hetero-friendly hotel chain took root, the Columbus campaign represents a deliberate escalation of creative ambition. The launch date was not incidental. June 2019 placed the film directly within Pride Month, amplifying its resonance across LGBTQ communities both in Spain and internationally. The simultaneous opening of AxelBeach Miami, confirmed by axelmag.com, marked the brand's first foray into the United States market, and Columbus served as the creative announcement of that expansion. The campaign's narrative reinterpretation — described in Spanish on clapboard.com as replanting Columbus's arrival from a point of view of respect and fraternity — gave Axel Hotels a vehicle to speak about its values at the precise moment it was crossing its own ocean. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 71 out of 100.
Axel Hotels built its market position on a specific and durable insight: LGBTQ travellers seek hospitality environments that affirm rather than merely tolerate their identities. The Columbus campaign sharpens that insight by moving from lifestyle imagery into historical allegory, asking audiences to reconsider not just a hotel stay but five centuries of received narrative. As documented on axelmag.com, the campaign was described as reframing Columbus's arrival in the Americas from the values of respect and fraternity — a deliberate choice to ground contemporary LGBTQ advertising in a story that belongs to everyone.
The competitive context in Spain is meaningful. Brands such as Marriott and Melia Hotels International operate across the Spanish hospitality market with broad-spectrum inclusivity messaging, but neither occupies the specifically LGBTQ-centred positioning that Axel Hotels has held since its founding. Axel's hetero-friendly framing, documented on leadiq.com and shangay.com as a long-standing brand pillar, differentiates it structurally rather than through campaign tactics alone. Columbus extends this differentiation into the realm of cultural commentary.
In Spain, the travel and leisure sector was performing strongly in the period around 2019. European hotel occupancy averaged approximately 73% in the four years preceding 2019, according to data cited by Les Roches and PACRA. The global hotel industry carried an approximate value of roughly one and a half trillion US dollars in 2019, according to readkong.com. Within that context, Axel Hotels' decision to invest in a high-craft NSFW film rather than conventional hospitality advertising reflects a confidence in its audience's appetite for narrative over promotion. The Pride Month timing in Spain, combined with the AxelBeach Miami launch, gave the campaign both a domestic emotional anchor and an international commercial rationale.
Creative director Kike Doatis led the Columbus campaign from concept through execution. According to adsoftheworld.com, Doatis served simultaneously as creative director, concept and script author, and executive producer — a concentration of creative authority that is reflected in the film's singular point of view. Director Albert Grabuleda translated the script into moving image, with art and design handled by Núria Garcia and production managed by Arantxa Gandiaga, as documented on adsoftheworld.com.
The casting choices are central to the film's meaning. Benjamin Poirier, a dancer from Spain's National Dance Company, and Daniel Barrios, a Venezuelan businessman and Poirier's real-life partner, appear as the film's protagonists, according to adsoftheworld.com. The decision to cast an actual couple rather than actors playing one collapses the distance between performance and reality, giving the NSFW classification an emotional rather than merely provocative function. Their relationship is the argument the film is making.
The film operates as historical allegory with a contemporary emotional register. The Columbus narrative — one of the most contested and culturally freighted stories in the Western canon — is stripped of its political complexity and reconstructed around the idea of discovery as an act of love rather than conquest. This inversion is not accidental. In the context of LGBTQ advertising in Spain in 2019, reframing a story about arrival and encounter as one about respect and fraternity carries specific cultural weight. The production sits within Axel's broader NSFW Collection, a creative strand that the brand uses to signal creative seriousness and adult candour — distinguishing its advertising from the sanitised inclusivity messaging that characterises much mainstream hospitality travel communication.
No verified performance data for the Columbus campaign is publicly available. No awards attributed to the film from Cannes Lions, the Effies, D&AD, The One Show, Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC have been found, as confirmed by clapboard.com.
Structural analysis, however, identifies several factors that would have supported meaningful impact. The campaign launched on 17 June 2019, as reported by axelmag.com, placing it at the height of Pride Month in Spain — the moment of maximum audience receptivity for LGBTQ-centred narrative. The simultaneous opening of AxelBeach Miami, documented by axelmag.com, gave the film a dual function: it operated as brand values communication in Spain while also announcing commercial expansion into the United States. A single campaign asset serving two markets at once represents efficient creative deployment.
The casting of Benjamin Poirier and Daniel Barrios as a real couple, confirmed by adsoftheworld.com, provided an authenticity signal that earned media coverage is likely to have amplified. In the Spanish travel and leisure sector, where Axel Hotels competes against broad-spectrum chains including Marriott and Melia, creative distinctiveness of this order is a structural advantage. The NSFW classification, rather than limiting distribution, serves as a selectivity mechanism — ensuring the audience engaging with the film is self-selected and therefore more predisposed to the brand's values. The Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100 reflects a campaign with genuine creative conviction and clear strategic alignment, held back principally by the absence of documented performance outcomes and the concentration of the creative effort into a single media asset.
The Columbus campaign is a 2019 NSFW film by Axel Hotels, published in Spain in June 2019. It reframes Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas through a narrative of respect and love, carrying the core message Cambiemos el odio por amor — Let's change hate for love — as reported by axelmag.com.
Creative director Kike Doatis led the campaign as concept author, scriptwriter, and executive producer. Film direction was handled by Albert Grabuleda, with art and design by Núria Garcia, according to adsoftheworld.com. The agency behind the campaign has not been publicly disclosed.
Axel Hotels launched Columbus on 17 June 2019, as reported by axelmag.com, aligning with Pride Month in Spain and the simultaneous opening of AxelBeach Miami. The timing connected the brand's LGBTQ values to its first United States property launch, giving the film both cultural and commercial purpose.
Benjamín Poirier, a dancer from Spain's National Dance Company, and Daniel Barrios, a Venezuelan businessman, appear as the film's protagonists. According to adsoftheworld.com, the two are real-life partners, a casting decision that grounds the film's LGBTQ narrative in lived rather than performed experience.
The Columbus campaign by Axel Hotels holds a Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100. The score reflects strong creative conviction and clear strategic alignment with Axel's LGBTQ hospitality positioning in Spain, offset by the absence of documented performance data and the campaign's reliance on a single media asset.
No awards attributed to the Columbus campaign have been found from Cannes Lions, D&AD, The One Show, Clio Awards, the Effies, the Webby Awards, or WARC, as confirmed by clapboard.com. The campaign has not appeared in publicly documented award shortlists or winner announcements from those bodies.
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