Known for their collection of remarkably uncommon hotels, The Leading Hotels of the World (LHW) has more than 400 properties in over 80 countries around the globe. With such an extensive amount of hotels comes the need for a lot of visual content.
Just imagine, that’s about 400 different webpages, ads, emails and more that all need unique and relevant visuals to promote, inspire and ultimately encourage bookings at LHW’s properties.
Facing this uphill content battle, LHW wanted to begin leveraging the hundreds of thousands of pieces of content their guests were already capturing and sharing from their various locations.
To help them discover, aggregate and leverage that authentic guest content, they needed a user-generated content (UGC) marketing platform.
For LHW, Stackla ticked all the boxes.
“What really set Stackla apart for us was its forward-looking technology.” Jose Canelos, Senior Manager of Digital Product Development at The Leading Hotels of the World.
When Jose’s team began preparing the roll out of their new UGC strategy, they decided on a two-pronged approach that included a user-generated content roadmap and an implementation roadmap.
This was a crucial step, since they needed to work out how this influx of visual content was going to “play nice” with the branded content they were already using throughout their channels.
Once they had a complete plan of action, they were ready to begin launching their first UGC activations.
In the travel and hospitality industry, inspiration is key and experience is everything. So LHW set out to first boost inspiration and engagement across their website using UGC.
“There is nothing better than our guests sharing the remarkably uncommon experiences they have at Leading Hotels with us and their friends on social media,” Jose said.
Using Stackla to discover and curate the best authentic guest images from across various social networks and hotel locations, LHW created a ‘Trending Moments’ section on their homepage to prominently feature this compelling visual content.
They also launched a webpage specifically dedicated to UGC to serve as real-time, cascading inspiration for site visitors.
To help move potential guests from inspiration to booking on their site, LHW leverages Stackla’s ShopSpot capabilities to make the UGC on their homepage and Trending Moments page actionable.
When The Leading Hotels of the World first began developing a user-generated content strategy, they focused on boosting online engagement by supplementing their existing content with authentic guest content. In the months since they started showcasing UGC across their site, they’ve seen significant results.
Beyond helping LHW improve online engagement and bookings, Stackla’s AI-powered content curation and predictive recommendation engine, Co-Pilot, has also helped them increase the amount of UGC they’re aggregating while reducing the amount of time they spend curating and publishing it across their site.
Now that UGC has proven it can drive results across their website, The Leading Hotels of the World is planning to expand its use to their other online and offline channels.
“We want to start transferring the success of our UGC web instances into our email marketing and Facebook ads,” Jose said.
In the meantime, they’ve already started to display guest content on live screens at the LHW office and LHW hosted events as a unique way of greeting and engaging office visitors and event attendees. It also serves as a good reminder for hotel managers to remember to ask that their guests tag their holiday photos with the #LHWTraveler hashtag in order to be featured on the website, lobby screen or event screens for others to see.