Yellowstone National Park Lodges

Building a Multi-Season Destination Content Library Inside America’s First National Park

Client
Yellowstone National Park Lodges (Xanterra Travel Collection)
Hospitality brand operating all lodging properties inside Yellowstone National Park

The Challenge

Yellowstone National Park Lodges needed a full refresh of their visual storytelling across web, social, and paid media. Much of their existing content was outdated and didn’t fully reflect:

  • The scale and diversity of properties across the park

  • The experience of staying inside Yellowstone

  • Seasonal differences between summer and winter travel

  • Dining, wildlife viewing, and sustainable operations

They needed content that could both elevate brand perception and actively help convert prospective guests into room bookings.

The Approach

Rather than treating this as a single production, we designed a multi-season capture strategy to build a long-term content system for the brand.

Over the course of three capture windows (22 total shoot days):

  • September 2023 (7 days):
    Focused on comprehensive coverage of all lodge properties, core guest experiences, dining, and wildlife viewing across the park.

  • January 2024 (8 days):
    A winter-focused capture window highlighting winter lodging, snowcoach access, winter activities, and the dramatically different guest experience during Yellowstone’s off-season. This shoot presented significant logistical and environmental challenges, requiring flexible planning and adaptive production workflows.

  • June 2024 (7 days):
    Focused specifically on Roosevelt Lodge and the Cowboy Dinner add-on experience, capturing a more experiential and activity-driven story layer to complement the broader destination content.

Each capture window was planned to produce modular content that could support multiple platforms and future campaigns, not just one-time hero films.

The Output

Across the three capture windows, production delivered:

  • A suite of hero destination and property films

  • Lodge-specific storytelling pieces

  • Seasonal experience films (summer and winter)

  • Short-form social cutdowns and paid media assets

  • A comprehensive, multi-season b-roll library covering:

    • All park lodges

    • Guest experiences

    • Dining

    • Wildlife viewing

    • Sustainable operations

This approach created a flexible media system where assets could be repurposed and re-cut to support new campaigns without additional production inside the park.

Where the Content Lives

  • Yellowstone National Park Lodges website (hero videos and property pages)

  • YouTube channel

  • Paid social campaigns

  • Brand and campaign landing pages

  • Internal marketing and partner materials

The content continues to be actively used across platforms today.

Why This Worked

This project demonstrates how destination and hospitality brands can:

  • Build a reusable, multi-season content library

  • Capture a true sense of place that sells the experience of staying on-site

  • Extend the value of each production effort

  • Support both brand storytelling and direct-response goals (room bookings)

  • Reduce future production friction by creating a comprehensive asset base

By approaching Yellowstone as a long-term content system rather than a one-off shoot, the brand now has a scalable foundation for future campaigns across seasons and channels.

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