IHG Hotels & Resorts

This semester, SOC3 is thrilled to be working with IHG Resorts through Allison Worldwide.

IHG, a global leader in hospitality with brands that span from InterContinental to Holiday Inn, is known for creating exceptional guest experiences and driving meaningful social impact.

Allison Worldwide, a top integrated communications agency, brings innovative strategy and storytelling expertise to amplify those efforts.

Together, this collaboration gives SOC3 students the chance to contribute innovative perspectives to real-world campaigns while learning directly from industry leaders.We couldn’t be more excited to collaborate with such an iconic brand and take on this incredible opportunity.

Brand Development

Members: Anna Addison, Hannah Brelsford, Max Borgenicht, Sara Terrasa and Celeste Earle

Made to Remember: 75 Years of Holiday Inn

Our work for IHG Hotels & Resorts this semester focused on highlighting the 75th anniversary of the Holiday Inn chain, as well as promoting Holiday Inn as the best hotel choice for younger generations of travelers, specifically Gen Z and millennials. Through our background and field research, we determined that some of the best ways to successfully reach the target audience are by creating unique and interactive celebrations paired with fun giveaways, gamified in-app experiences, and culturally relevant celebrity partnerships. With this in mind, we created three different deliverables to create a refreshed brand identity for Holiday Inn and prove that they’re a premier hospitality vendor for young travelers.

Link to final presentation: FINAL: Holiday Inn Deliverables

Deliverable #1: Rockin’ Into the 75th Year

Rockin’ Into the 75th Year celebrates Holiday Inn’s 75th anniversary by transforming the Holiday Inn Times Square into an elevated, modern New Year’s Eve lounge activation and experience, bringing together select guests, celebrities, and influencers. This event will reimagine Holiday Inn as a contemporary, relevant hospitality brand that centers them in the middle of one of the biggest, most iconic celebrations of the year. The lounge promotes connection and celebration in tandem with a new era of vibrance and relevance. This experience will also extend beyond this event to be digitally accessible through influencer-hosted livestreams, offering behind-the-scenes, interactive access, and highlighting the New Year’s giveaway. This giveaway rewards one grand prize for a five-day Holiday Inn stay at their dream destination, in addition to ten winners who will receive 75,000 IHG One Rewards points.

Deliverable #2: Milestone Memories

The Gamified Badge System invites customers to engage with Holiday Inn’s 75th anniversary through a year-long interactive experience. Over the course of 12 months, participants can unlock a new badge each month, with every milestone revealing exclusive rewards and bonus IHG One Rewards points. Titled “MilestoneMemories,” the program celebrates Holiday Inn’s rich legacy by highlighting historic moments and industry firsts that shaped the brand’s story. This immersive experience blends celebration and engagement, allowing guests to learn about Holiday Inn’s history in a fun, rewarding way while earning tangible benefits for their loyalty and participation.

Deliverable #3: Feel This Moment

Feel This Moment is a dynamic, year-long stealth marketing campaign centered around global icon Pitbull, seamlessly blending music, travel, and culture to reintroduce Holiday Inn as a modern lifestyle brand. Designed to resonate with both Gen Z and Millennials, the campaign taps into pop-culture nostalgia and Pitbull’s famous reference to Holiday Inn in his hit “Hotel Room Service,” creating a playful bridge between generations. By linking IHG One Rewards to this cultural moment, members gain exclusive opportunities, transforming fan excitement into lasting brand loyalty.

Planted Media

Earned Media Coverage

Giveaway and Owned Social Media Post

Creative Strategists

Members: Kendall Rapp, Melanie Scheel, Lakeisha Waichungo, Rachel Squire, Marley Joseph

Holiday Inn Through the Decades

For Holiday Inn’s 75th Anniversary, the Creative Strategists designed a “Through The Decades” Campaign, featuring a media campaign, a website, and an immersive pop-up experience to close out the series of events. The Holiday Inn “Through The Decades” campaign was designed to connect Holiday Inn’s brand to nostalgic memories and pop culture references from throughout the past 75 years, increase brand loyalty and IHG One Rewards members, and drive general engagement with Holiday Inn locations across the United States.

Link to final presentation: FINAL: Holiday Inn Through the Decades

Deliverable #1: The ‘Holiday Inn Through the Decades’ Pop-Up Event

We created an immersive pop-up experience at Holiday Inn’s Times Square location, featuring eight uniquely designed rooms spanning decades from the 1950s to the present day. Each room would resemble a Holiday Inn room, consistent with its green color scheme, and would include memorabilia honoring the brand’s legacy. To enhance the time-travel experience, the rooms will honor the interior design touches of that era: the 70s room will honor the bohemian aesthetic, and the 2000s room will honor the trend toward see-through technology. The rooms will offer photo opportunities for guests to post and share on social media. It will also include audio-immersive opportunities that make the event special and unique for those attending; they can pick up a landline phone and hear a Holiday Inn guest’s story from that era.

We used Canva’s AI to draft descriptive paragraphs of what we wanted the rooms to look like so we could get mock-ups. The descriptions included the era, interior and architectural styles, pop culture easter eggs, and an emphasis on green to honor the brand. The mock-ups helped IHG visualize the vision for the rooms and how they would operate.

Holiday Inn Room Mockups from the 1950s to 2020s (left to right)

Link to file with images: Holiday Inn Room Mockups

Deliverable #2: The Website + Media Campaign

When guests leave the pop-up, the experience doesn’t end there; that’s where our website takes over. To extend that in-person experience into a digital one, we created the Holiday Inn Through the Decades website, the central hub of our entire campaign. Everything showcased in the activation becomes fully explorable online: users can dive deeper into the 1950s, 1990s, and 2020s rooms, interact with the decade timeline, preview the Times Square installation, take the quiz, and RSVP or enter the contest, all in one place. Strategically, the website is where discovery, engagement, and conversion all happen. And as you read through our tactics, you’ll see how all of them drive traffic back to this site. Every influencer for the media campaign directs their audience here because the entire media campaign is designed with one goal: funneling people into the website’s storytelling ecosystem. The quiz acts as our engagement engine, pulling users into the experience and sending them to the decade room that matches their personality, while the RSVP and contest function as our lead-generation tools. Ultimately, the website isn’t a separate deliverable; it’s the connective tissue that ties all our touchpoints into a single, continuous, immersive story.

Link to website: Holiday Inn Through the Decades website

Deliverable #3: The Contest

Our “Win a Stay Back in Time” contest turns our decade-themed rooms from something guests view into something they can actually live in, making it one of the most immersive parts of the entire campaign. Designed exclusively for IHG One Rewards members, the contest gives participants the chance to choose their favorite decade room, the 1950s, 1990s, or 2020s, and enter to stay in that themed space for a whole week at our Times Square location. All entries happen through the website, reinforcing our goal of driving digital traffic and engagement. Participants select their room, explain why they chose it in one sentence, and submit their IHG One Rewards–associated email, password, and name, allowing the brand to strengthen its loyalty database while offering a meaningful reward. From a strategic standpoint, the contest acts as our core lead-generation tool: it encourages account creation, fuels repeat engagement with the site, and keeps guests connected to the brand long after they’ve left the pop-up. Flyers, influencer content, and all media placements point directly to the contest landing page, ensuring the digital ecosystem stays central to the campaign. With a one-week stay scheduled for March 24–30 and the winner reveal set for March 10, the contest extends the excitement, incentivizes participation, and transforms nostalgia into an unforgettable real-world experience.

Community Engagement

Members: Alondra Cueto Ramirez, Faith Starchia, Ezra McAdams, Marley Hollister

The Future Looks Bright

IHG Hotels and Resorts and American University worked on a semester-long experiential learning opportunity with SOC3. The future generation of communications worked with Allison Worldwide to generate creative deliverables backed by data and insights on the IHG Masterbrand. The focus of our tactics centered upon the next generation traveller, aged 25 to 35, and the goal was to attract them to the IHG Masterbrand. Our target audience within this group of travellers were those that travel for leisure and are overwhelmed with choices. Along with the audience that struggles with job insecurity and cares about sustainability. Each of our tactics seek to understand the next gen traveller, meet them where they are and show that IHG cares about the same causes that they do.

Link to final presentation: FINAL: The Future Looks Bright

Deliverable 1: How IHG Fits Your Hotel Needs: Link to the Stars

The goal of this deliverable was to create a fun campaign that catered to the NextGen traveler experience and framed traveling from their point of view. Based on our research, we found that astrology had taken over the lives of the target audience (travelers between the ages of 25-25). Over 80 percent of Gen Z and Millennials believe in Astrology and there’s over 4.5 million TikTok videos with the hashtag astrology. We wanted to create a link between IHG and astrology in order to attract that 80 percent.

Through this deliverable, travelers could “doom scroll” and see themselves in an IHG hotel based on positive aspects of their zodiac and the numerous amenities IHG hotels have to offer. By having events catered to the zodiac signs, the audience would have another incentive to go book with IHG in order to attend the event, which influencers will be at. Through the influencer partnerships, the audience could also see their favorite astrology influencers enjoying themselves at these hotels, influencing them to book at an IHG hotel during their next travel adventure. Through the partnership with the Co-Star, the audience would see how IHG is making an effort to care about what they care about, as IHG went out of their way to create the app partnership and make it easier for them to be comfortable at their hotels.

Deliverable 2: IHG Academy: Next Gen

Building off of the masterbrand’s existing skills-building initiatives, IHG Academy: Next Gen is an opportunity for Gen-Z-targeted storytelling. While researching, we noticed growing concerns among young adults over entry-level job opportunities. In the age of AI, job fields are rapidly changing; however, the hospitality industry remains stable and offers significant growth opportunities. IHG already offers internships, workshops, and free online courses through IHG Academy, but they fail to market these opportunities effectively. IHG Academy: Next Gen is a short documentary highlighting three unique journeys through the program. The doc presents a story from each of the three key program opportunities: early-career workshops, online skills academy, and in-house internships. Our deliverable was driven by a mock storyboard video that uses existing IHG content and our own ideas to demonstrate IHG's commitment to meeting the needs of its Gen Z audience, not just selling a hotel room. We are positioning the masterbrand as conscientious and motivated to support local communities through workforce development.

Link to: Mock Storyboard Video

Deliverable 3: One You, One Earth One Rewards

During our field research we found that there is an expectation for international clients to have sustainable practices in their hotels since that is an expectation in their countries. We wanted to highlight IHG’s pre-existing sustainability initiatives and rewards features by making it more pronounced. We also wanted to highlight IHG’s One Reward’s points to get more members. To do this we wanted to do this by implementing an IHG Green Rewards points into IHG’s One Rewards through actions that guests can do during their stay. We would want to make green rewards points highlighted in April to go along with Earth Day, but make them an option year-round.

To publicize this we also wanted to create a social media challenge called #GuestHowYouEarth where users would post TikTok videos of how they implement sustainability practices into their life, while traveling, or while staying at an IHG Hotel. If IHG liked the #GuestHowYouEarth videos, users would be contacted and they would get IHG Green Rewards points.

Link to: Social Media Challenge

The IHG Green Rewards points and the #GuestHowYouEarth challenge would be incentivized by a giveaway stay at the InterContinental San Francisco which is a lead in water conservation efforts. The #GuestHowYouEarth campaign and giveaway would be available through the full month of April as well. For the giveaway, the winner would be the person who got the most IHG Green Rewards points that can be achieved through implementing sustainable actions during their stay and by participating in the social media challenge. The winner would be announced in May.

RIO

Members: Arati Periyannan, Fatiha Washington, Kalea Grant, and Stella Koch