Kimpton Hotels Is Maintaining Its Brand Values, One Social Media Post at a Time

As travel brands join more conversations on social media, being casual and keeping the brand identity and values intact has to be more fluid. That's especially hard when you're a well-love brand that gets purchased by a global giant, as happened when InterContinental Hotels Group bought Kimpton in December for $430 million. Kimpton's biggest fans turned to social media first to voice their worries, but Kimpton has maintained its own identity since the merger, especially across Twitter, Facebook, and the other social channels. Skift caught up with Whitney Smith, Director of Social Media Manager at Kimpton Hotels and Restaurants about how it still differentiates its brand and translates its values on social media. An edited version of the interview follows: Skift: The ways that Kimpton Hotels is trying to differentiate itself against its competitors is really important. Can you go into more depth on your brand values? Smith: If you think about airports, a lot of times that's just a faceless experience. There's nobody checking you in who is just super kind, and oftentimes you're not speaking to the person next to you on the plane. Bill Kimpton started our hotels to really take some of the loneliness and coldness out of the travel experience, which I think is really cool, and makes a lot of sense, especially to someone who has been traveling for business for the past ten years. You look at the design of our hotels, we have what we call living rooms. We don't call our lobbies lobbies, we call them living rooms, and they ha