St. Regis resorts unite the tranquil and exquisite in the world’s most inspiring destinations. In 2023, the brand opened its newest resort — The St. Regis Kanai Resort, Riviera Maya. With its striking modern design spread above the mangroves of Mexico’s Yucatan coast, the resort embodied the ideal of the brand’s resort experience in beautiful, dramatic fashion.
For a resort opening of this caliber, St. Regis needed more than an announcement. It required an exquisite story — an exploration of the inspiration, craftsmanship, and environment that created the Best Address on Mexico’s Caribbean shores, bringing the brand’s audience inside one of its most stunning escapes.
To create this in-depth look into its newest resort, St. Regis created a first-of-its-kind for the brand Designing the Best Address video series, made to be shared through St. Regis social media channels.
The video series was carefully planned to incorporate each element of what makes the St. Regis resort experience in Kanai so exquisite. Our scope included 4 installments — architecture, interior design, destination, and the rituals and traditions that define St. Regis as the House of Glamour.
This video series was conceived entirely for social media with Instagram Reels specifically in mind — 9x16 format, each part under a minute in length, and including in-video captions to tell a complete story no matter how audiences interacted with it.
To create a comprehensive visual narrative, the video series brings together captivating moments at every scale — sweeping aerial shots above the Caribbean coast, modern design contrasting a lush expanse of mangroves, close attention to incredible details and exquisite views. The series also features talent to capture an ideal guest experience at the center of it all.
To deepen and expand on the visual narrative, the videos also include the brand’s largest implementation of voiceover in social content to date. This narration further tells the story of Kanai, adding an evocative layer to our content that goes beyond what just visuals and social copy can achieve, emphasizing the roots of Kanai’s design, its landscape, and the exquisite moments that it holds.
We evaluated our success on the Designing the Best Address video series through reach and video views, with our typical opening posts used as a baseline of comparison. With the series generating over 800k impressions and 850k views, it far exceeded the numbers generated by previous new hotel announcements.
The Designing the Best Address video was also a success in terms of content, with the finished videos capturing all the intended facets of the resort, and the combination of elevated visuals and narration setting a new standard for how a new St. Regis destination can be messaged on social media.
By taking an expansive approach to presenting the story of a tentpole hotel, the Designing the Best Address series showed that focusing on in-depth social-first video can capture the attention of the luxury travel audience, generate strong brand awareness, and reveal the exquisite experience of the Best Address.
