Banyan Tree

(The current site reflects subsequent updates. The work described below was completed by Acoustic in 2017.)

Luxury hospitality copy has a problem. It tends to reach for the same vocabulary regardless of the property, the location, or the guest: breathtaking, unparalleled, world-class, exquisite. After a while, the superlatives cancel each other out and nothing feels luxurious at all. It just feels like marketing.

In 2017, Banyan Tree Hotels & Resorts asked Acoustic to rewrite the copy across their entire digital presence. That meant 40 properties across the Banyan Tree and Angsana brands, spanning Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and beyond. Each property had its own character, its own setting, its own guest experience. The copy had to reflect that without defaulting to the generic luxury register that was making everything sound the same.

The brief was precise and unusual in equal measure: make it alluring, but use fewer superlatives. Create something modern and relatable without sacrificing the sense of occasion that the brands had built over decades. Write for a guest who has stayed in exceptional hotels before and is not easily impressed by adjectives.

The approach was to let the specifics do the work. The location, the architecture, the view from a particular suite, the feeling of arriving somewhere that has clearly been thought about. Good travel copy earns its atmosphere through detail rather than claiming it through volume. That discipline ran across all 40 properties, across both brands, while keeping each property's individual voice intact.

The result was a more grounded, more confident body of copy that treated the reader as someone worth talking to properly.