If a family is 50 miles out of Yellowstone National Park, filling up at a gas station, Best Western wants to send them a message about any vacancies nearby. To this end, an ad for the Best Western Desert Inn in West Yellowstone could pop up on a digital billboard on the highway, gas station screen or mobile phone app.

“That’s when we can get really creative with the brand,” said Price Glomski, executive VP of emerging media at digital agency PMG, speaking about how the agency works with Best Western to connect data, like location information, to marketing. In 2020, PMG started working with Best Western, when the pandemic was raging and the travel industry was among the hardest hit. Best Western had to get smarter about how it markets 4,500 hotels across the world to increase the value on higher demand locations like ones at U.S. National Parks and beaches, and understanding when to shut off marketing for locales that didn’t need it.

“When the world kind of came to a stop in travel,” said Dorothy Dowling, senior VP and chief marketing officer of Best Western Hotels and Resorts, “what we wanted to do was make sure we had very strong investments in performance-based marketing.”

At first, Best Western pulled back on digital marketing, refraining from even running ads on Facebook and Instagram, for instance, Dowling said. The company was focused on search and “meta-search” advertising, which appears on third-party travel sites. When the vaccine rates started going up in the U.S. in 2021, Best Western returned to Facebook and Instagram.

The company has used PMG to incorporate more data, across the world in real time, to guide its marketing. “It’s enabled us to look at a lot of data in traffic, regional data, weather data, vaccination data,” Dowling said. “That allowed us to make decisions about where we wanted to invest, but also allowed us to have a deeper understanding of the business.”

The digital marketing plan is starting to pay off, Dowling said, with 45 days of record bookings through Best Western's website. That bookings are coming directly into Best Western’s website is an important distinction. Brands like Best Western want to engage more directly with customers because then they have access to more data. How data is collected is especially relevant due to the privacy policy changes being implemented worldwide. Europe is implementing the General Data Protection Regulation, and platforms like Apple are restricting tracking on mobile devices and computers.

Best Western said that bookings from “lower funnel channels of search and metasearch” were up 27% last summer compared to 2019, before the pandemic. Best Western also said it saw success with brand advertising goals when it returned to Facebook and Instagram last year. It studied “ad recall,” how many people remembered seeing ads, and said it was “156% above the Facebook Travel norm.”

Best Western is an example of how major brands are making adjustments to the new data regulations, and how companies are coming out of the pandemic with a new mindset. At the height of the pandemic, U.S. hotel occupancy rates fell to about 20%, and it has been creeping back up closer to pre-pandemic levels, but the comeback has been jagged. To start the year, the omicron variant stalled the return of business travel, for instance.

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Glomski points to another example: Best Western is using data to predict when a guest is likely to cancel, which has been one of the major problems during the pandemic. “We needed to go and adjust our CPMs [cost per thousand views of ads]—our bids, our frequency capping, our creative,” Glomski said, “when we predict this is actually a consumer that’s in market versus one that’s potentially going to cancel because there is an uptick in COVID.”

Best Western would not reveal details about its marketing budget in 2022, like how much it spent compared to 2020 or how much goes toward search, social, connected TV, TV and out-of-home. Best Western works with third-party location services like Foursquare, which works with PlaceIQ, to help track when ad views lead to fulfilled bookings. And Best Western’s programmatic ad buying across the internet and connected TV goes through The Trade Desk, the demand side platform, Dowling said.

PMG has to “ensure that they’re not burning cash and that we’re really buying effectively for each property and each room, every night,” Glomski said.

Best Western plans to launch a TikTok account over the summer, Dowling said, gaining a foothold in one of the fastest-growing social channels. The hotel chain has already been active on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter. The bigger push this year is into loyalty programs, as most hotels have seen the writing on the wall in terms of needing to generate closer relationships with consumers.

“This is the year of loyalty,” Dowling said. “The loyalty program is the focal point of the recovery, for all the reasons that we know, with cookies going away for privacy,” Dowling said. The loyalty program helps “integrate our advertising in a much more sophisticated way.”