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From First Impressions to Lasting Impressions: How Best Western Hotels Transformed Its Video Marketing with Lumen5
The best way to describe my experience with Lumen5 is that it's incredibly intuitive to pick up — even people without training can use it. We're really happy with what we can produce, and we're making content that's super professional.
ABOUT BWH HOTELS
Over 4700 Hotels Worldwide
BWH Hotels was founded in 1946. Today, they are one of the world's leading hospitality companies, with over 4700 hotels worldwide. There are more than nineteen brands operating under the BWH Hotels' umbrella, several of which the core company directly markets for. Alongside its original legacy brand, Best Western Core, these include:- Best Western Plus, which maintains higher design standards and more luxurious amenities such as name brand exercise equipment.
- Best Western Premiere, top-of-the-line hotels with restaurants, meeting spaces, and other high-end amenities.
- SureStay, economy-branded hotels with multiple variations.
- Multiple boutique brands, including Vibe, Glow, Aiden, and Sadie.
The one thing that unifies each of these brand's is the company's commitment to its guests — to providing people with the best stay possible.
Robert Schaub, Marketing Program Manager, Best Western Hotels
As Best Western Hotels' Marketing Program Manager, Robert is responsible for everything from marketing strategies to negotiating vendor contracts. A BrightEdge Certified professional, he holds a Bachelor's degree in Cinematography and Film/Video Production from Collins College, where he graduated Cum Laude. He has worked with BWH Hotels for more than sixteen years to date.
THE CHALLENGE
Checking Out of Outdated Video Content
For the hospitality sector, interactivity is everything. Today's travellers want to know everything about the experience a hotel offers before they commit to a booking. BWH Hotels knows this.
For the past several years, Robert and his team have pushed for more interactive marketing materials that both showcase the company's diverse brands and encourage customers to sign up for the Best Western Rewards program.
Alongside photos and text descriptions, the company began deploying interactive 360-degree walkthroughs created in Google Tours roughly four years ago. These walkthroughs quickly grew outdated. Robert and his colleagues realized that they needed a more agile approach. Enter video.
The issue we kept running into was one of efficiency. How do we show off the amenities and white space of each location and ensure all materials are up to date without detracting from any of our brands? Video was the answer, but that came with its own problems.
Robert initially began creating branded videos in Adobe After Effects. Unfortunately, this proved ineffective at scale, as a single video could take hours or even days to create. Multiply that by the number of rooms, multiplied by the different locations, multiplied again by the different boutique and unique branding - it simply wasn’t sustainable. The marketing team would find itself trapped in a never ending cycle of scrambling to update old content.
Although working with a video production company would solve this time crunch, it would be at a cost that could charitably be called exorbitant, and with no guarantee that Best Western Hotels wouldn't simply receive a cookie cutter video.
How could each Best Western brand’s unique and luxurious features be accurately reflected in a video without taking forever? This called for a top-ranked yet unique solution that needed to offer the whole nine yards - free nights and no blackout dates included please!
We tried working with production companies, but they wanted $60-$70K per brand, and every time we needed to update a video, they were going to charge us more money to do it. It simply wasn't a cost-effective solution at all. We needed something that we could control, a solution that would allow our marketing consultants to go in and create videos with our photographer's photos.
THE SOLUTION
Taking the Stairs? No, the Elevator!
As BWH Hotels began assessing potential vendors, the company’s CMO recommended Lumen5 after seeing a live video demonstration from a peer.
The CMO and Schaub reached out for a referral, and soon afterwards purchased 26 seats for the platform! And they were off to the races, creating videos for every idea they could think of!
Perfect Timing, Perfect Pairing
Best Western Hotels began onboarding and training on July 12 2022 with an incredibly narrow timeline to support its annual convention in October. Lumen5's onboarding specialist worked closely with Robert’s team to make this happen.This meant empowering them to create videos for pre-conference, mid-event, and post-conference marketing, including promotional videos, recaps, and engaging videos for attendees.
The company then began sharing videos internally to promote awareness of the platform, connecting with freelancers working for each of its brands.
"Onboarding and adapting Lumen5 to our needs was totally painless. There wasn't much of a learning curve, and they're very supportive of their product and our needs," says Robert Schaub, Marketing Program Manager, Best Western Hotels
Lumen5 empowers video production workflows with sophisticated AI (artificial intelligence) and an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. Requiring only an Internet connection, the platform maintains an extensive library of stock assets with full support for branded content.
Scaling and Maximizing Video Efforts for Eleven Luxury Brands
Lumen5’s Creative Services team built 4 custom templates in 60 days, covering 11 brands — something that was impossible with the agency model. This special upgrade allowed Best Western Hotels to fully launch their video marketing at scale across its biggest luxury brands.
"The AI aspect of Lumen5 was a big draw for us, allowing the platform to be truly plug-and-play with images and media, especially with branded materials and templates. We were also impressed with Lumen5's extensive and intuitive customization, which was hugely important for our boutique brands, many of which are quite unique."—Robert Schaub, Marketing Program Manager, Best Western Hotels
THE RESULT
An Elite Status for Video Production
97%
reduced time to create videos
480+ videos
created in one year
50 Videos
produced in a single week
94%
cost reduction compared to agency prices
Currently, 24 employees within BWH Hotels use Lumen5, and between them they've created over 475 videos since the platform was first deployed just over a year ago. The company has also produced over 50 videos for social media, 25 of which were for a single hotel.
Lumen5 has become a pivotal tool in the company, BWH Hotels has expanded the scope of its deployment well beyond its initial use case: videos for Google listings and TV displays around the hotel lobbies.
Since its deployment, Lumen5 has become a pivotal tool in the company. Best Western Hotels has expanded the video creation tool well beyond its initial use case: videos for Google listings and TV displays around the hotel lobbies.
Other use cases for Lumen5 range from: creating event videos for the company’s annual convention, consisting of seven district meetings and three regional meetings, which the platform has proved useful for both promotional videos and presentation videos. This past year, Best Western Hotels even used Lumen5 to create a presentation for its CEO.
To: the company also using Lumen5 for both internal and customer training videos, ranging from information on its Best Western Rewards loyalty program to details on procedures, strategies, and initiatives. Other video content includes tailored promotional videos for each hotel type, media for hotel lobby displays, and amenities highlights.
Lumen5 cuts down on countless hours of work, and it's also fun to use. It doesn't feel like an addition to anyone's workload, and users are proud of what they're creating. That's the best part of it — it's such a time saver, and the AI component that draws out your storyboard for you is incredibly helpful. You don't have to think it through, you can just produce things faster and for a very cost-effective price.