From First Impressions to Lasting Impressions: How Best Western Hotels Transformed Its Video Marketing with Lumen5
ABOUT BEST WESTERN
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.
"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."
Robert Schaub, Marketing Program Manager, Best Western Hotels
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Checking Out of Outdated Video Content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 These walkthroughs quickly grew outdated.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 Schaub, Marketing Program Manager, Best Western Hotels
A video workflow that could no longer keep up
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."
Robert Schaub, Marketing Program Manager, Best Western Hotels
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!
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.
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.
"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."
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.
“With the traditional agency, the time is usually about one week. But with Lumen5, it’s cut down from weeks to hours.”
Visual content director at Siemens AG
“Lumen5 is especially helpful for business people who don't have the technical experience to make their own videos.”
Media relations and content manager
“Thanks to Lumen5, we have been able to cut down on the time and costs related to video making.”
Global advertising and sponsorships
“We’re able to create a video quickly with a turnaround of five minutes versus trying to coordinate with an agency and see if they have time to fit you in. With Lumen5, you could just get it right then and there.”
Social & digital content manager
“The best part about Lumen5 is that it's not time-consuming. It's really easy and you only need a couple of minutes to create a video because everything is included.”
Senior online marketing manager
“We have scaled Lumen5's use across our marketing organization, realizing benefits across many team layers. As company communicators, this agile tool enhances each customer's experience and engagement.”
Director of global integrated marketing, Emerson
“We saw increasing demand within Communications for an intuitive self-service video production tool and Lumen5 filled the gap.”
Creative & digital assets manager, Corporate Voice, Swiss Re
Best Western needed a faster, more affordable way to produce high quality branded videos across more than nineteen hotel brands. Traditional tools like After Effects were too slow, and agencies were too costly and unable to capture the unique personality of each brand. Lumen5 offered a scalable, intuitive, AI driven solution that empowered the marketing team to produce polished videos in house.
With boutique, economy, luxury, and premium brands under one umbrella, consistency is essential. Lumen5’s Creative Services team built custom templates aligned with each brand’s identity. This ensures every video reflects the correct look, feel, and luxury standard, whether it is created for Best Western Core, Aiden, Vibe, Glow, or any of the other BWH brands.
Before Lumen5, creating a single video could take days. With Lumen5, production time dropped by 97 percent, enabling the team to create over 480 videos in a year and more than 50 videos in a single week. The AI powered storyboard generation and drag and drop interface eliminated bottlenecks and enabled rapid content updates across hundreds of hotel locations.
Agencies quoted Best Western 60 to 70 thousand dollars per brand with additional fees every time a video needed updating. Lumen5 reduced content creation costs by 94 percent and allowed the team to update videos at any time without extra charges. The result is faster turnaround, more creative control, and a significantly lower total cost of ownership.
Best Western uses Lumen5 for a wide range of video needs, including Google listings, hotel lobby displays, brand promotions, event recaps, training videos, Best Western Rewards program content, and executive presentations. The platform supports everything from quick social clips to polished multi brand videos for conventions and district meetings.
One of the biggest benefits for Best Western is that Lumen5 requires no advanced design knowledge. Marketing consultants, brand teams, freelancers, and hotel staff can all create professional videos using branded templates and AI assistance. This ensures high quality output while freeing designers from repetitive production work.
