W PRESENTS: The Retreat at W Koh Samui set out to redefine W Hotels’ global music platform through a creator-first lens. Rather than producing a traditional travel campaign, the idea was to turn a luxury resort experience into serialized digital entertainment authored by creators themselves. This shift reflected a broader goal: to establish cultural relevance through storytelling that felt human, humorous, and rooted in real experience rather than brand polish.
The timing created a unique opportunity. With The White Lotus igniting global fascination with Thailand and set-jetting driving measurable spikes in travel intent, Koh Samui became the ideal stage to position W Hotels as the most culturally connected brand in Marriott’s luxury portfolio. The Retreat was designed to harness this momentum and translate cultural buzz into brand equity.
The specific goals were to:
1. Elevate Brand & Destination Awareness: Position Koh Samui and W Hotels at the center of the post–White Lotus travel surge through creator and artist amplification.
2. Build a Creator-Led Narrative Model: Give creators authorship–from concepting to performance–to produce a four-part social series and supporting content that blurred the line between campaign and social entertainment.
3. Outperform Social Benchmarks: Deliver above-benchmark engagement, saves, and shares through lo-fi capture built for TikTok and Instagram discovery.
4. Drive Business Outcomes: Support incremental demand for W Koh Samui while lifting brand favorability and awareness across global markets.
The strategy behind The Retreat was clear, to turn a traditional luxury hospitality experience into creator-led entertainment that could drive cultural relevance, social performance, and demand for W Koh Samui.
The plan focused on three core pillars:
1. Co-Create, Don’t Commission: Instead of treating creators as contractors, we brought them in as collaborators. Kitty Lever, Benton McClintock, and Pooja Tripathi helped shape the tone, humor, and narrative structure of the content before arriving on property. This gave the campaign an authentic voice and ensured the storytelling felt rooted in their real personalities.
Strategic value: Higher resonance, stronger shareability, and a storytelling model built for social consumption.
2. Design for the Social Scroll: All content was engineered for TikTok and Instagram behavior. Lo-fi, in-the-moment capture allowed audiences to experience The Retreat in real time, while cinematic post-event edits gave the campaign longevity.
Strategic value: Above-benchmark engagement and consistent placement in trending conversations.
3. Blend Brand With Culture: The timing was intentionally aligned with the global White Lotus travel wave, positioning Koh Samui within a moment of rising demand for Thailand content. We paired creators with global artists—including Bonobo, LP Giobbi, and Crystal Kay—and regional creators like Taiki and Noah to extend reach across music, nightlife, and APAC communities.
Strategic value: A culturally embedded campaign that reached audiences far beyond W Hotels’ owned channels.
How We Brought It to Life: The Retreat unfolded through a multi-phase social narrative that made the campaign feel like an unfolding story rather than a recap:
This structure helped audiences follow a cohesive arc and turned a weekend event into serialized entertainment.
Challenges & Innovation: There was no existing model for a hybrid creator–luxury–music program, so the team built a new framework that merged event programming with serialized entertainment. Maintaining authenticity while respecting luxury standards required a blended visual identity that layered W Hotels’ design language over the creators’ humor and tone. And in a saturated travel content landscape, standing out meant anchoring the program in a real cultural moment. By intentionally aligning with global interest in Thailand and set-jetting behavior, The Retreat broke through the noise and positioned W Koh Samui at the center of that conversation.
Creative Originality: The Retreat’s biggest innovation was turning creators into the face, voice, and narrative engine of a luxury campaign. Their unscripted chemistry and co-written scenes made the series feel more like social entertainment than branded content. The mix of global artists, regional KOLs, and creator-driven storytelling built a world audiences wanted to stay inside, setting a new creative benchmark for how W Hotels shows up in culture.
The Retreat exceeded all performance benchmarks across owned, earned, and creator channels. On W Hotels’ owned platforms, the campaign delivered 17.2M+ impressions, 2.5M+ engagements, a 10.7% engagement rate, and 7.7K+ saves and shares, placing it among the brand’s top-performing programs of the year. One video became W Hotels’ second most-shared Instagram post year-to-date, underscoring the strength of the creator-led narrative.
Creators and artists extended impact further, generating 8.8M+ impressions, 360K+ engagements, 175 posts, a 6.12% engagement rate, and $133K in earned media value. These results demonstrated that giving creators authorship—not just amplification—drives scale and authenticity.
Audience sentiment confirmed the campaign’s cultural relevance. Comments frequently referenced The White Lotus effect, escapism, and the desire to “binge all the Thailand content,” signaling that The Retreat successfully positioned Koh Samui as an aspirational destination. The four-part creator series became the core narrative engine, with audiences following along as if it were entertainment rather than advertising.
Brand lift studies reinforced the program’s impact, showing +6.6 points in consideration (vs. +1.5 benchmark) and +10.5 points in favorability (vs. +1.4 benchmark). The activation also contributed to incremental demand for W Koh Samui during a heightened period of global interest in Thailand, directly supporting booking consideration goals.
The Retreat established a new creative blueprint for W Hotels. By proving that creator-led storytelling can outperform traditional formats, it set the foundation for future W PRESENTS efforts—more culturally embedded, more scalable, and more effective across global markets.
