As any hospitality marketer knows, you can face a wide range of unwelcome guests including poor-quality photos, out-of-date materials, and painfully-slow approvals. The task is hard enough for hotels owned and operated under one group; it’s perhaps even harder when you have franchises and independent operators that sit under one brand.

That’s why in Canto’s new two-part Bizibl series for travel and hospitality brands, we’re bringing you the latest insights in content management, along with hot-off-the-press examples… including a way to reduce your creative team’s workload by 25%!

For part one, let’s look at how to keep your brands consistent no matter how many air-miles are between your locations.

Global Brand, Centralised Content

As a rule of thumb, the more your portfolio grows the more important it is to centralise your content. Having multiple locations across many markets and continents makes the content management process complicated, so hospitality businesses need a simple, reliable way to organise and distribute all their assets.  

A Digital Asset Management (DAM) Platform like industry-leader Canto helps travel and hospitality brands keep consistent by:

• Providing a single place for photos, videos, files, brochures and other digital assets
• Saving time by making files easier to find with AI-powered search
• Automatically organising and tagging content using AI
• Letting teams self-serve the content they need
• Allowing each location to upload content for central approval
• Reducing the risks of outdated content

Of course this sounds great, but how does it work in reality? Time to book a stay with luxury hotel group The Set.

Case Study: The Set Hotels

Unlike hotel groups that own and operate properties, The Set curates independently owned hotels under its brand. With 15 luxury properties in the collection – and more added every year – the challenge of reviewing, organising, and distributing content grew too.

Kasia Rudnik, Senior Director of Marketing, explains why The Set turned to Canto’s DAM solution to scale brand consistency across its growing portfolio: “We’re an affiliation brand, so each hotel has its own independence and branding. Our role is to support them with the buying power of the affiliation. We use Canto for all our assets, logos, brand guidelines, SOPs, templates, advertising, presentations – everything lives there. It’s our brand Bible.”

The group now has more than 90,000 assets organised and easily searchable, with the impact felt across the business. New hotels are onboarded faster, press requests are fulfilled immediately, and teams have a single trusted source.

Each property can upload their own photography and video files directly into Canto, for the central marketing team to review, refine and approve. Now it only takes 3 to 5 days for new hotels to have their full asset library organised and ready to use.

Canto keeps all of The Set’s core brand materials in one place, so everyone can quickly find the most current resources and self-serve the assets they need. Teams spend less time searching for files and more time launching campaigns. When it comes to media enquiries, even journalists can instantly access the pre-approved photography, logos and videos they need from The Set’s press portal.

For the marketing team, having assets centralised in Canto has reduced the need for outside creative support and asset rework by 25%. 

Wherever The Journey Takes You

So, as your hospitality brand looks to expand, make sure your software and processes keep up. Wherever the journey takes you, the chances are that a DAM platform is the best way to build a scalable system so your business can keep growing.

Coming up in part 2 of this series… Canto looks at how the world’s best travel and hospitality brands are creating long-lasting customer relationships through personalised content.

Want to find out more? Download Canto’s guide to DAM for travel and hospitality.