Yellowstone National Park Lodges Case Study — The Wanderous

Yellowstone National Park Lodges

22 Days Inside America's First National Park

Industry
Destination Hospitality
Client
Xanterra Travel Collection
Shoot Windows
3 Seasons
Total Shoot Days
22 Days

Yellowstone doesn't care about your production schedule.

The bison cross the road when they want to. The geysers go when they go. In January, the roads close to regular vehicles entirely. You're on a snowcoach or you're not going. Filming inside the park means building a production approach that accounts for all of it: the scale, the weather, the wildlife, the permit logistics, and the fact that every lodge has its own character and every season transforms the place into something different.

We spent 22 shoot days inside the park across three separate trips to get this right.

Yellowstone National Park Lodges (operated by Xanterra Travel Collection) needed a full visual refresh across web, social, and paid media. The existing content didn't capture the range of what they actually offer: the diversity of properties, the dramatically different summer and winter experiences, the dining, the wildlife access, the particular feeling of sleeping inside the park boundaries rather than just visiting.

They needed content that could build brand perception and drive room bookings and they needed it to last.

Rather than one big production push, we designed a three-window capture strategy that treated the project as a long-term content system from the start.

September 2023
7 Shoot Days
Comprehensive coverage of all lodge properties, core guest experiences, dining, and wildlife viewing across the park during peak season.
January 2024
8 Shoot Days
A full winter capture window. Snowcoach access only. Sub-zero temperatures, geysers in frozen landscapes, the completely different guest experience that Yellowstone's off-season offers. Logistically, the most challenging window and visually the most striking.
June 2024
7 Shoot Days
A focused return to Roosevelt Lodge and the Cowboy Dinner, capturing the more experiential, activity-driven layer of the brand we hadn't fully covered in the first two windows.

Hero destination films. Lodge-specific storytelling pieces. Seasonal experience films for both summer and winter. Short-form social cutdowns and paid media assets. A comprehensive multi-season b-roll library covering every lodge, every major guest experience, dining, wildlife, and sustainable operations.

The library is deep enough that the marketing team can build new campaigns around it without ever having to ask for another shoot day inside the park.

22
Total shoot days inside the park
3
Seasons captured: summer, winter, spring
All
Park lodges and properties covered
Still running
Content actively used across platforms today
Website Hero and Property Pages YouTube Paid Social Campaign Landing Pages Internal and Partner Materials

Twenty-two days sounds like a lot. But when you're building a content system for one of the most complex, most seasonal, most logistically demanding destinations in the country, one that has to serve everything from Instagram to broadcast TV to a hotel booking page, it's exactly what it takes. We went in planning for the long game. The content is still running.

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