Ahead of the Hospitality Social Media Summit, taking place in London on 3–4 September 2026, we spoke with Laura Ferrari and Stefano Della Schiava, two of the summit’s faculty and two of the most experienced voices in international brand and content strategy.
Laura is the former Director of Social Media for Hyatt across Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and co-founder of SHIFT Collective. She has led international social strategy for hospitality, luxury and fashion brands across culturally diverse markets. Stefano is the former Head of Nespresso’s Content Studio and has built content and creative operations for brands including Toyota Europe and Mastercard.
In this interview, Laura explains why the booking journey shifts from market to market and why message, not translation, is where international campaigns break. Stefano sets out why scalable brands think in systems rather than campaigns, and where human judgement matters more as AI accelerates production. Together they preview Winning Hearts Worldwide, the Day 2 lab where delegates build a Regional Activation Plan.
You led social media for Hyatt across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. What did that vantage point teach you about how differently guests in different markets discover and choose hotels?
Laura: We assume the booking journey follows one logical path, the same for everyone. It doesn’t. The path is rarely linear, and it shifts from person to person, market to market. Too often, when we build campaigns, we pour our energy into the message itself – perfecting the brand’s tone of voice – and pay far less attention to the cultural shades, emotions, and motivations that actually drive someone to book. One of the Hyatt EAME summer campaign made that concrete. In Europe, the creative that worked was almost under-produced: a guest opening the balcony doors onto the Mediterranean, natural light, ambient sound, nothing that looked staged. In the Gulf, the same season called for the opposite: a family arriving at a grand lobby, greeted with traditional gahwa, settling into a private cabana. Polished, aspirational, respectful of family and privacy. Same brand, same summer, two different emotional truths, and the creative had to shift with them, not just the copy. Leading social across Europe, Africa and the Middle East gave me that testing ground: campaign after campaign, I saw how much those cultural nuances decide whether a regional idea lands or falls flat.
You have said that hotel brands targeting international travellers are often spending budget in the right markets with the wrong message, on the wrong platforms, for the wrong emotional reason. Which of those do teams get wrong most often, and what does it cost them?
Laura: Message, most often. Teams treat translation as the finish line: take one line of copy, run it through ten languages, send it. What gets lost isn’t the words, it’s the emotional register. Even within Europe, English translated literally into German or Italian rarely lands the same way; the words can be perfectly correct and still leave the audience cold. We need language that finds the right chord for that specific audience, not just the right vocabulary. Platform compounds it: to stretch budget, teams often reuse the same channels everywhere, ignoring that in some markets a less obvious platform – Snapchat, for instance – would reach that audience far more effectively than the default choice. But message is where it usually breaks first. The cost isn’t abstract. It’s not just a lower number on a report nobody rereads, it’s a guest who scrolls past because the ad clearly wasn’t made with them in mind, and a media budget spent reaching someone who was never going to convert. Worse, it plants an idea in that market: this brand doesn’t get us. That’s harder to undo than one underperforming campaign.
Take us one step earlier. How should a hotel decide which one or two international markets genuinely deserve its budget, and what signals tell you a market is worth the investment?
Laura: It has to start as a commercial decision, not a brand ambition. The first layer is logistics and volume: which are our key feeder markets, where do we already have the most hotels, and how easy is it to get from that market to the properties we want to fill – direct flights, rail links, real ease of travel. The second layer is our own data: where our current guests are actually coming from, and whether the market fits our seasonality and cultural profile. Only after that do I look outward: where the website traffic on that hotel’s page originates, what competitors are already doing in that market, and how mature our brand is there, because that tells you what kind of campaign and message you’ll need, not just whether to run one at all. None of these signals matter in isolation. A market can look perfect on paper for feeder volume and still be the wrong bet if brand awareness there is close to zero because then you’re not selling a stay, you’re introducing a brand, and that’s a different budget and a different timeline entirely. When the signals conflict, I weight commercial reality – feeder volume, connectivity, existing guest base – over ambition. That’s what turns a long list of countries into the one or two markets that actually deserve the money.
Having built content operations for Nespresso and shaped work for brands such as Toyota Europe and Mastercard, where do you see the biggest gap between how hospitality brands produce content today and what a scalable content operation requires?
Stefano: The biggest gap is that many hospitality brands still think in terms of campaigns, while scalable organisations think in terms of systems. Campaigns are temporary. Systems are permanent.
Across brands like Nespresso, Toyota and Mastercard, what made content scalable wasn’t producing more assets. It was designing an operating model where strategy, creative, production and local adaptation all worked from the same foundations.
Hospitality often creates beautiful content, but every campaign starts almost from scratch. Different agencies, different briefs, different production partners, different approval processes. That creates inconsistency and unnecessary cost.
A scalable content operation works differently. It defines what should never change, the brand principles, the visual language, the core narrative, while deliberately designing everything else to be modular. One shoot should create content for social, CRM, paid media, retail, partners and local markets simultaneously, not sequentially.
The real shift isn’t producing more content. It’s extracting more value from every production
For readers who have never worked with a content studio, what problem is it designed to solve, and how is that different from simply producing a succession of campaigns?
Stefano: A campaign answers the question: “What do we want to say this season?”
A content studio answers a different question: “How do we continuously tell the brand’s story every day, across every touchpoint?”
That’s a fundamental difference.
Most hospitality brands don’t struggle because they lack ideas. They struggle because the pace of modern marketing has changed. One campaign no longer feeds an entire year. Brands now need content across social, paid media, websites, CRM, digital screens, travel partners and local activations, often simultaneously.
A content studio isn’t simply an internal production team. It’s an operating model that connects strategy, creative excellence, production, governance and measurement into one continuous system.
Instead of reinventing the process every quarter, the studio creates consistency, efficiency and speed without compromising creativity.
Laura, your framework identifies the right market, message, platform and emotional motivation. Stefano, your work builds the content system capable of delivering that consistently. Where do hospitality teams most often lose the connection between strategy and execution?
Laura & Stefano: Usually during the handover.
Strategy is often developed centrally, then translated into creative briefs, then passed to agencies, then adapted by regional teams, then interpreted again by local markets. At every handover, a little of the original intent disappears.
By the time the content reaches consumers, everyone has executed their task correctly, yet the final output no longer reflects the original strategy.
The organisations I’ve worked with reduced that gap by introducing governance rather than control. Clear principles. Shared planning. Modular content. Defined ownership. Local freedom within central guardrails.
Execution shouldn’t dilute strategy. It should express it.
Emotional hooks rarely travel unchanged. Can you share an example of an angle that resonated in one market but not another, and explain how you find the story that will translate?
Laura: Sure, I think the 2024 Andaz campaign “Be Like No One’s Watching” is a good example. We built everything around one idea: Andaz as a brand of maximum self-expression. But self-expression doesn’t look the same everywhere, and that’s exactly the point. In London, it’s loud, theatrical, and deliberately norm-defying. We partnered with characters like Dolly Pawton, bold, unapologetic, larger than life, because that’s the emotional register that resonates in a city that celebrates eccentricity as a form of identity. In Bali, the same idea became something quieter and more rooted: an Indonesian artist whose crocheted installations explore the fragility of marine ecosystems. Self-expression there is inseparable from cultural identity and connection to place. While in Seoul, it translated into emotional interiority, an artist whose work blends Korean pop art with urban energy, described as a direct reflection of his own feelings. The campaign idea never changed. The emotional hook it needed in each market did. That’s the work most brands skip, and it’s the difference between content that travels and content that just gets posted. Finding that hook always starts with the same question: what does this experience mean to someone from this culture, not to us.
Local creators are often described as the shortcut into a new market. What separates a creator partnership that genuinely builds trust with international guests from one that just looks good in the feed?
Laura: The shortcut framing is already the problem. Brands that treat local creators as a market entry tactic get transactional results, content that looks credible but doesn’t build anything. The partnerships that actually move trust share three things: the creator has a real community behind the numbers, not just reach; the collaboration is built on genuine value alignment, not aesthetic fit; and the relationship is designed to last beyond a campaign cycle. Those principles don’t change whether you’re activating in your home market or entering a new one. What changes locally is who that creator is and what trust means in that culture but the foundation is always the same.
Hotels feel pressure to feed more channels with more content every year. How do you scale output without quality and brand consistency slipping?
Stefano: The instinctive response is usually to produce more.
I think the better response is to produce smarter.
Every production should be designed around a content ecosystem rather than a hero asset. Instead of shooting one film and then creating social content afterwards, you plan from day one for multiple formats, audiences, markets and channels.
At the same time, consistency doesn’t come from policing creativity. It comes from building clear design systems, reusable templates, shared asset libraries and governance that allows teams to move quickly without constantly asking for approval.
AI will increasingly automate production, versioning and localisation, but the brands that stand out won’t be the ones producing the highest volume of content. They’ll be the ones with the clearest creative system behind it.
What disciplines from brands such as Nespresso and Mastercard could hospitality teams adopt to make their content more consistent, recognisable and commercially effective?
Stefano: Three disciplines stand out.
First, think in ecosystems rather than campaigns. Every piece of content should strengthen the wider brand, not exist in isolation.
Second, design for reuse from the beginning. The most valuable productions aren’t necessarily the most expensive. They’re the ones that continue creating value months after the shoot because they were planned for multiple audiences, channels and markets.
Third, build governance into the operating model rather than the approval process. The strongest brands don’t stay consistent because someone checks every asset. They stay consistent because everyone understands the principles they’re working from. That’s something luxury brands like Nespresso have done exceptionally well. Consistency becomes cultural rather than procedural.
You ran campaigns that had to work across several cities and cultures at once, including the Park Hyatt activation around Fashion Week in Milan, Paris and London. How do you keep one brand voice while giving each market room to adapt?
Laura: One principle I’ve always worked by: consistency doesn’t come from making every market do the same thing, it comes from making sure everyone understands the brand’s role in culture. The Park Hyatt Fashion Week campaign is a proof of that. We activated across Milan, Paris and London, three cities with distinct fashion identities, audiences and creator ecosystems, each expecting something different from a hotel brand showing up that week. The intent and the format stayed identical everywhere: curated city guides, built with local talent, positioning Park Hyatt as the starting point for anyone in town for Fashion Week who cared about design, fashion and culture, not just the shows. What changed from city to city was who told that story. We worked with talents who actually knew each city, people who could point to the hidden gems a visitor would never find on their own, not just the obvious fashion-week circuit. The result felt unmistakably Park Hyatt wherever you encountered it, but never a copy-paste of the city next door.
When content must work across several markets, what should remain centrally controlled and what should local teams be free to change?
Stefano: I think about it as protecting the brand while empowering the market.
Centrally, I’d keep the brand narrative, visual identity, strategic objectives, measurement framework and the core content architecture. Those elements create recognisability across markets.
Locally, I’d give teams freedom over creators, cultural references, language, casting, moments, partnerships and platform behaviour because that’s where authenticity comes from.
Problems arise when organisations centralise cultural decisions or decentralise brand decisions. Those are the wrong things to optimise.
The goal isn’t identical content. It’s recognisable content.
As AI makes content production faster and cheaper, which parts of the content system will require stronger human judgement rather than less?
Stefano: AI is rapidly removing production as the bottleneck. The constraint is shifting from creating content to deciding what deserves to be created.
That makes human judgement more valuable, not less.
The hardest decisions remain deeply human: understanding cultural nuance, identifying meaningful consumer insight, protecting brand distinctiveness, recognising when something feels emotionally true rather than merely technically correct.
AI can generate hundreds of versions of an asset in minutes. It can’t yet decide which story is worth telling or whether that story genuinely reflects the brand.
The future content operation won’t be built around replacing creatives. It will be built around giving creative teams more time to make the decisions only humans can make.
At the Hospitality Social Media Summit, delegates in Winning Hearts Worldwide will build a Regional Activation Plan. What will that plan enable them to decide, adapt and execute more confidently when approaching their next international market?
Laura & Stefano: Walking out with a Regional Activation Plan means walking out with a decision already made, not a deck to present back to leadership, but a working document that answers the questions that usually stall international campaigns before they start. Delegates will leave knowing which market deserves their attention right now and why based on demand signals, not aspiration. They’ll have identified the emotional role their brand needs to play in that market, which platforms match how those travellers actually discover and validate destinations, and what in the brand stays fixed versus what genuinely needs to flex. Most importantly, they’ll have answered the governance question that kills localised content in practice: who decides what. Without that clarity, the best strategy stalls at the briefing stage. The plan compresses the six weeks of misaligned conversations that typically precede an international campaign into a single session so the next one starts from alignment, not assumption.
The Hospitality Social Media Summit takes place live in London and online on 3–4 September 2026. Across two days, delegates work with award-winning global leaders to build practical social strategies, systems and assets designed specifically for hospitality.
To explore the programme, meet the faculty and secure your place, visit hospitalitysocialsummit.com.
