Wyndham Hotel Group Sharpens Focus On Content Management
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
Wyndham Hotels May Turn to Guests for Property Photos and Videos
Wyndham Hotel Group, the world’s largest hotel company with approximately 7,540 hotels and part of Wyndham Worldwide Corporation has announced that it will streamline distribution of property photos for its global portfolio of hotels to more than 6,000 leading global distribution channels and tens of thousands of affiliated travel websites in nine languages in an effort to better showcase properties to travelers.
As part of the multi-million dollar overhaul of its content management system, Wyndham Hotel Group is actively considering offering curated guest photos as part of its visual mix.
According to Martin Smith, vice president of online retailing at Wyndham Hotel Group, the group is “actively exploring” adding curated guest photos, and more video, including clips that would give guests a sense of things to do in hotels’ environs, although there are “no firm plans or dates.”
Some of Wyndham’s rivals already integrate guest photos from Instagram on brand websites, and TripAdvisor enables users to upload their own photos as a counter-balance to hotels’ own marketing-oriented photography.
Wyndham Hotels, meanwhile, has signed on ICE Portal as its image-distribution vendor, dropping Leonardo VFM in the process, to serve up a maximum of 50 images per property, up from the previous 25, and at higher resolutions, Smith says.
The campaign plays a key role in the multi-phased evolution of the group’s content management strategy, which aims at ensuring greater content consistency and quality across all partner channels.
During Phase one of the evolution, which was recently completed, all of the company’s content was migrated to the Adobe Experience Manager platform. During Phase two, the company is working to build a robust digital asset library, which will enable partners to more quickly and easily pull curated versions of the company’s more than 95,000 property photos in the resolution that is most appropriate for a particular channel.
“Creating, managing and sharing content that is both engaging and of a high-quality is critical to the success of not only our organization but the success of our thousands of franchisees,” said Martin Smith, vice president of online retailing at Wyndham Hotel Group. “The photo distribution landscape is changing and we are seeking to offer higher resolution, better quality images as well as the flexibility to adapt those images to a variety of applications and needs. Our new complete integration solution allows us to deliver great property visuals everywhere they need to be while at the same time offering significant increases in both efficiencies and cost savings.”
There is no cost to Wyndham’s franchisees for its migration of the chain’s more than 95,000 property images to ICE Portal. Franchisees can optionally contract directly with ICE Portal to create videos and 360-degree property tours.
While many hotel chains always thought of exterior photography of properties as an overriding concern, Wyndham has realized that the reality is that interiors matter.
“Room images are on top of customers’ minds,” Smith says. “The exterior has always been a mainstay, we thought, but it is less critical to consumers that the room they would like to stay in.”
Since overhauling its website a couple of years ago, Wyndham often shows photography of each room type, and the chain intends to add more video showing the breakfast buffet and the hotel gym, for example, Smith says, and the chain is also putting new emphasis on textual property descriptions, which is handled by a team at Wyndham headquarters in New Jersey, supplemented by an operations center in Canada.