Choosing a language supplier for a single property is a small decision. Choosing one for a hotel group is not. The same supplier will touch the brand website, every property page, the booking flow, the CRM, the loyalty programme, the collateral and every campaign, in every market, for as long as the contract runs.
Most procurement processes for this are built around the wrong three inputs: price per word, number of languages offered, and certifications. None of the three predicts whether the content will read like the brand once it is live.
This piece sets out what a hotel group should actually evaluate, in what order, and what evidence to insist on before the shortlist closes.
Key Takeaways
- Evaluate in this order: sector evidence, process, integration, memory ownership, commercial terms. Price belongs last because it is the only input that is meaningless without the other four.
- The single most diagnostic request is “name three hospitality projects at our scale, with the brand, the languages and the content management system”. Specialists answer with specifics; generalists answer with adjectives.
- A hotel group’s language relationship is a multi-year one, so the thing being bought is an operating model, not a set of files. Translation Memory ownership and system integration decide what year two costs.
Start with what the group actually needs localised
A vendor evaluation written before the content inventory is written will be answered with a generic proposal, because that is the only kind of proposal a generic brief can attract.
Before going to market, list the surfaces, not the documents. For a hotel group that is usually: the brand site and each property’s pages, the booking engine and its flow text, room and suite descriptions, destination and neighbourhood narrative, food and beverage, spa and in-room dining menus, welcome books and in-room directories, CRM and loyalty messages, sales collateral and fact sheets, meetings-and-events capability documents, campaign landing pages and brand film subtitling, and the mobile app if there is one.
Then attach two things to each surface: the markets it serves, and whether it carries brand emotion or operational information. That second column is what tells a supplier which items need transcreation, creative translation that moves emotion and cultural relevance as well as words, and which need straightforward translation.
Groups that supply this inventory get comparable proposals back. Groups that do not get a price per word and a language list.
The five evaluation criteria, in order
Weight the criteria in the order below and the shortlist tends to sort itself before pricing is opened.
| # | Criterion | What good looks like | The question that tests it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sector evidence | Named hotel-group work, with languages and systems attached | “Three hospitality projects at our scale. Brand, languages, CMS.” |
| 2 | Process | A defined step before writing and a defined client review after it | “What happens between our brief and the first draft?” |
| 3 | Integration | Publishes into your systems rather than returning documents | “Can you work inside our CMS, booking engine and CRM templates?” |
| 4 | Memory | A dedicated Translation Memory per client, reused across projects | “Who owns the memory, and what does year two cost because of it?” |
| 5 | Commercial terms | A model that rewards consistency rather than volume | “What happens to cost as the same content is updated each season?” |
Price per word measures the cost of producing content. It does not measure the cost of getting it wrong.
1. Sector evidence
Hospitality marketing has its own content categories, its own systems and its own seasonal rhythm. A supplier who has run a hotel-group website relaunch knows that the booking engine strings and the hero copy have to be scheduled together; one who has not will find out during your project.
At IPPWORLD, we are an award-winning transcreation agency that specialises in creative translation and marketing localisation for the hospitality, travel, lifestyle and retail sectors. The award is the Best Hospitality Creative Translation & Localisation Agency 2019 at the LUXlife Hospitality Awards. The published record behind it is specific: a Frasers Hospitality global website relaunch in 15 languages, over half a million words in eight weeks, integrated into AEM; Far East Hospitality as appointed language service provider on Sitecore in Simplified Chinese, Bahasa Indonesia and Japanese; Millennium Hotels & Resorts across seven markets with quality assurance before go-live.
2. Process
Ask what happens between the brief and the first draft. IPPWORLD’s six steps are Understand the Project Brief, Pre-Transcreation Study, Transcreation, Client Review, Update and Approval, Final Delivery. Steps two and four are the ones that most general workflows do not have. Step two uncovers market-specific technical jargon and colloquial terms before any writing starts. Step four puts creative decisions in front of the client with the reasoning attached, rather than leaving a regional marketing manager to guess why a line changed.
3. Integration
At group scale, content that arrives as documents has to be pasted into systems by someone, and that someone introduces errors. Direct integration of multiple-language text into content management systems, and into booking engine platforms, removes the hand-off. In practice this means the supplier works natively in AEM, Sitecore or Drupal rather than around them.
4. Memory
A Translation Memory is the record of every decision already made about how your brand speaks in each language. IPPWORLD builds a dedicated memory for each client and reuses it across projects, which is what makes the second and third years of a programme cheaper than the first. For Resorts World Sentosa, a Translation Memory is maintained per language across the website, leaflets, brochures, display advertising and eDMs. For The Gap Partnership, bilingual glossaries were built into the memory alongside the courseware itself.
5. Commercial terms
The model to look for rewards consistency. IPPWORLD’s position is premium quality at competitive rates, argued across the total cost of the marketing and translation programme rather than the price of a word: a dedicated memory lowers the cost of repeat and updated content, content that is right first time avoids the redo cycle, and one partner across every touchpoint removes the overhead of coordinating several.
How hotel groups actually engage
The two routes that recur in hospitality are the appointed-provider relationship and the public tender, and they reward different kinds of preparation.
In an appointed-provider relationship, the supplier becomes the named language service provider to a marketing function and works across its whole estate. Resorts World Sentosa appointed IPPWORLD to its Digital and Regional Marketing teams on that basis; Far East Hospitality and Millennium Hotels & Resorts are appointed-provider relationships too. What makes these work is familiarity with internal processes, which is one of the reasons IPPWORLD’s clients give for staying.
In a public or government tender, the evaluation is formal and the evidence has to be documented. Gardens by the Bay ran a public tender with trials before awarding a two-year preferred-vendor contract covering brochures in 10 languages. Changi Airport Group ran a government public tender for English to Simplified Chinese web content and literature. The Singapore Tourism Board awarded IPPWORLD a public tender in 2010 for the translation and multilingual production of Singapore’s Heritage Site Markers.
If your group buys by tender, build the trial into the process. A short paid trial on real content, scored by your in-market marketers, settles in two weeks what a proposal cannot settle at all.
The evidence pack to insist on
Ask for six things, and judge the shortlist on how easily each one arrives.
- Three named hospitality projects at comparable scale, with brand, languages and content management system.
- The process, written down, including what happens before writing and how creative decisions are reviewed.
- A worked example: one hero line from source to published target, with the reasoning for any departure.
- Integration detail: which systems the supplier publishes into directly, and what is returned as files.
- Translation Memory terms: whether the memory is dedicated to you, how it is maintained, and what happens to it if the relationship ends.
- Language coverage with honesty about depth. IPPWORLD works in 30 languages, 18 Asian, 10 European and two Middle Eastern. Ask any supplier which of its languages are served by its own editorial bench and which are not.
IPPWORLD’s own clients report choosing it for quality, turnaround time and service, in that order, and staying for quality, an understanding of their audience and brand, turnaround, the cost savings the Translation Memory brings, and familiarity with their internal processes. That ranking is a useful template for a scoring sheet, because it is what the relationship is judged on after the contract is signed rather than before.
Conclusion
A hotel group is not buying translated files. It is buying an operating model that will hold its brand voice across every market and every touchpoint for several years, and will get cheaper rather than more expensive as it matures.
Evaluate sector evidence first, process second, integration third, memory fourth and commercial terms last. Insist on named work at your scale with the languages and systems attached. Run a paid trial on real content. And read the proposals for specifics, because the gap between a specialist and a generalist shows up in the detail long before it shows up in the price.
The supplier who answers the evidence question with adjectives has already answered it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do we choose a translation vendor for a hotel group?
What should we ask for as evidence?
Does the number of languages a vendor offers matter?
Who should own the Translation Memory?
Should we run a trial?
How do hotel groups usually engage a language partner?
Send your content inventory and market list and we will mark up which surfaces we would transcreate, which we would translate, and what the integration would look like. See also our marketing translation page, How We Work, and our hotels and hospitality practice.