Fairmont has come up with a novel way to help out the company, its staff and their family and friends during the global economic downturn.

The Travel Earn and Win programme started out as an incentive scheme for Fairmont's employees to provide their nearest and dearest with low room rates staying at the resort management company's chain of hotels across the world and has led to a large part of Bermuda's population getting in on the act as the word has spread.

In addition, Fairmont Bermuda has taken approximately 14,000 room night bookings - or 4,000 bookings, after running a separate promotion offering a rate of $99 for 99 hours.

In the Travel Earn and Win scheme, Fairmont staff have been contacting their relatives and friends with the employee-specific booking code needed to make reservations online at www.fairmont.com at 56 of its hotels from Bermuda, the US, Canada and Europe to Mexico, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, between $99 and $239, allowing them to get a significantly lower rate than previous local or family and friend rates, and is passed on to those people's significant ones and so on.

Last week, Fairmont Bermuda estimated that 740 room nights had been generated at The Fairmont Southampton and 550 room nights at The Fairmont Hamilton Princess.

In the first week, the programme had attracted almost 8,000 room night bookings alone across the chain's 56 hotels, with that number climbing to 17,000 by April 16.

It works by producing room nights in a market where hotels have been struggling with historically low occupancy rates, while introducing potential customers to the Fairmont brand who may not have come across it before.

Meanwhile, the Fairmont staff also cash in, with each employee whose number was used to make the booking receiving a $10 bonus per room night, with airline tickets for two being awarded to top bookers by region and random monthly draws for prizes held for all colleague booker numbers used to reserve rooms in the previous month.

Nelda Simons, regional director of human resources at Fairmont Bermuda, said the focus of the scheme was on providing a competitive friends and family rate by being recommended to stay in a hotel by a Fairmont employee.

"The objective and exercise is that the company recognises that there is a huge amount of business generated through the friends and family scheme," she said.

"It is about giving back with an incentive that helps the employees and the company at the same time.

"It will help get more people in the hotels and that is working not just in Bermuda, but around the world.

"The response has been quite phenomenal and it has been very well received by the colleagues, with a special luncheon held for them to mark the launch of the scheme."

On its first day of operation, more than 265 reservations were made for a total of 628 room nights.

The offer runs between April 2 and December 31, 2009.