How destination and hospitality marketing teams inspire wanderlust

Chances are, the last destination you visited was inspired by a beautiful photo on Instagram, a friend’s envy-provoking camera roll from their last vacation or a travel show. More than ever, the images we see influence the places we go.

For the travel and hospitality industry, marketing revolves around using imagery to weave together a narrative that inspires would-be travelers. This means brands don’t just need tons of content; they also need to be able to select the best pieces of content to use on-demand.

How do brands keep their huge content libraries under control and assets at hand? Here’s how three travel and hospitality brands use Canto to do it!

Inspirato

Inspirato curates truly relaxing luxury vacations, with details coordinated by dedicated service teams. Just take a look at their website, and you’ll see why imagery is so key to their marketing. Inspirato moved their tens of thousands of visual assets from a server to Canto for a faster, more user-friendly experience.

The marketing team uses the photos for campaigns, promoting Inspirato’s unique member experiences, merchandising the company’s inventory of hotel nights and vacation homes, media relations, the company’s own magazine and more.

“Canto is critical to everything we roll out since all of our marketing is so image heavy. Having all of our content ingested into one system that everybody can go to – that’s made Canto a one stop shop for our team,” says Joe Rahim, digital asset manager at Inspirato.

Now, everyone on the team is more empowered to fully understand the content they have, and to access it whenever they need it.

Canto democratized all of our content: everybody can see it quickly, understand what we have, and download it in a variety of different sizes and formats according to what they need. It created a culture of self-service and meaningful collaboration.

Read more about how Inspirato uses Canto here.

Visit Seattle

The nonprofit destination marketing organization (DMO) brings in tourists to the Emerald City from all over the world, helping to stimulate the local economy.

The marketing team uses Canto to centralize assets created by in-house photographers, freelance content creators and production agencies. To streamline their media relations workflow, the team created a media portal containing pre-approved assets that they can share with press with just a link.

The sales team, which brings meetings and events to the Washington State Convention Center, also uses Canto to quickly access images while in the field.

Canto helps the team work more smoothly together and focus on their goal of attracting visitors to Seattle, instead of finding photos.

“Canto is really easy to understand. It’s rare that people come to me for help with Canto, because it’s just so intuitive,” said David.

Read more about how Visit Seattle uses Canto here.

Downtown Boston Business Improvement District

Downtown Boston Business Improvement District is a nonprofit dedicated to making the 100-acre downtown Boston neighborhood clean, safe and welcoming.

The marketing team uses Canto to centralize their incredibly diverse image library, which includes thousands of photos of the cityscape, people and events. The team uses these images for event promotion, urban improvement and beautification, local and nationwide advertising, press coverage, selling real estate in the BID, social media and more.

“Canto is the centerpiece of a lot of what we do. Not a day goes by when we don’t use it in some form,” says George Comeau, marketing and brand activation manager at Downtown Boston BID.

Team members can now accomplish tasks such as finding and sharing images in a matter of minutes. George and his team can easily access Canto’s cloud-based platform anywhere with internet access, providing flexibility when team members work from home or go on vacation. With Canto, the team works better together and is able to unlock their creative flow.

Photography is a central part of telling our story. It’s impossible to do what we do without Canto.

Read more about how Downtown Boston Business Improvement District uses Canto here.