AI Advertising - Hospitality - 2020
BEST WESTERN
Personalizing travel recommendations.

Overview

Best Western wanted to engage consumers in active travel planning mode around peak holiday weekends – some of the busiest travel periods of the year. Our idea was to offer personalized travel recommendations and help take the pain out of the travel planning process.

MY ROLES
 Art Direction, UI Design, Visual Design

TEAMMATES
 Georgios Saliaris,  January Holmes, Robert Redmond


Banners and Conversation Flow

Content Strategy

& User Experience

We trained Watson on Best Western information to create the 1st AI-powered ad for the hospitality industry, delivering a unique travel recommendation for each user using:
  • Natural Language
  • Machine Learning
  • ​Audience Targeting
​​
The ad unit engaged in real-time conversations, offering tips, tricks, and inspiration for travelers on their upcoming destinations. Also, audience targeting was applied to reach consumers that were most likely to be business or leisure travelers, urban millennials, or had recently traveled.

Results

Best Western saw relevant time spent and an increase in traffic to their locations, including:
  • 2.2x higher time spent with IBM Watson Ads vs.Google Rich Media
  • 42 seconds average time spent per session
  • 48.6% incremental lift in visits to Best Western locations​