In a fast-paced, global industry like hospitality, delivering training that feels relevant, engaging, and human is no small feat. InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) used Spokn to do just that—transforming peer stories into powerful learning tools and strengthening team culture across continents. With Spokn, IHG scaled authentic, peer-driven content across 100+ countries—making learning faster, more relatable, and deeply connected to daily operations.
Learning and development in the hospitality industry is uniquely challenging. The 24/7, shift-based nature of the work, combined with a frontline, customer-facing workforce spread across diverse, multilingual environments, creates significant constraints.
With over 6,600 hotels employing 375,000 employees globally, InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) is no exception. Hospitality employees—from General Managers to housekeeping staff—often value insight from peers more than corporate training facilitators. This makes social learning particularly powerful, but difficult to scale. Given IHG’s presence in over 100 countries, relying on professional film crews for training content was neither cost-effective nor feasible.
IHG needed more than just a way to tap into peer knowledge—it needed a format that was fast, engaging, and easy to consume. Employees in frontline roles have limited time for learning, so content had to be short, visually compelling, and immediately useful. To meet these needs, IHG sought a solution that could capture and package frontline knowledge from any location in a dynamic, engaging way.
When Jason Ellisen, Director of Global Learning at IHG, discovered Spokn at an L&D leadership conference, he saw its potential immediately. Spokn’s video storytelling platform enabled his lean instructional design team to create short-form, TikTok-style videos that could engage even the busiest employees. Most importantly, Spokn allowed IHG to feature actual hotel leaders and employees.
The departure from animated content or corporate-led video content was something that Ellisen and his team had long discussed, but had found difficult to execute at scale prior to discovering Spokn.
“Spokn made it incredibly easy for us to put people at the center of our learning experiences. Now, instead of training materials featuring just the voices of our facilitation team, we have videos featuring hotel leaders and colleagues , speaking directly to their peers in their own words.”
In its first year using Spokn, IHG leveraged the tool to advance two key learning priorities:
For IHG’s ‘asset-light’ franchise model to thrive, owners and General Managers must deeply understand their hotel brands and be aligned with IHG’s values. However, a brand’s hospitality ethos and values can feel abstract and difficult to convey through traditional methods.
Ellisen and his team turned to Spokn to harness storytelling’s power in making brand values tangible. “Hearing specific examples of how the brand values come to life—from another leader responsible for making that happen—resonates with learners in a way that more traditional corporate training materials don’t,” Ellisen explained. “We even gathered reflections from long-time General Managers on what the brand means to them and played them to kick off training at a large leadership offsite. Those sessions were the highest-ranked of the entire event, largely because of the excitement and relevance of hearing from peers.”
Hearing from experienced peers also proved to be a powerful tool in preparing new General Managers for success. Before a training program for new General Managers, Ellisen’s team used Spokn to collect insights from seasoned leaders. These videos provided practical tips on key topics such as brand stewardship, navigating success as a new owner, and running a hotel without a dedicated sales leader.
Because the advice came directly from leaders in the field, it carried significant credibility. It also reflected the global nature of IHG’s brand, with leaders from different regions contributing, making the content more universally relevant than if it had been created solely by the corporate L&D team.
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While Spokn was introduced as a training tool, its ease of use quickly made it valuable for non-training purposes as well. Shortly after its introduction, Jason was delighted to find that his instructional design team had embraced it for team celebrations and engagement initiatives, in addition to the creation of learning content.
The team began using Spokn to create group birthday, workplace anniversary, and retirement videos, allowing colleagues across different locations to contribute personal messages in an authentic and effortless way. These videos became a meaningful part of the team’s workplace culture, strengthening social connections from afar.
“We never anticipated Spokn would be used for things like birthday and anniversary videos,” Ellisen said, “but it turned out to be a powerful way to bring people together. It’s been an unexpected but very welcome cultural benefit.”
One year into the partnership, Ellisen highlighted five key aspects of Spokn that made it an indispensable tool for IHG’s busy, deskless employees:
Spokn allowed employees to record from any phone or desktop with a single click—no app or software downloads required. “We were able to avoid sending film crews to various locations,” Ellisen explained. “Because leaders and employees could record clips on their own time, it wasn’t a big ‘ask’ or inconvenience, which made them more open to participating.”
Before Spokn, the L&D team was hesitant to integrate employee-generated content into training due to concerns about quality and brand consistency. Spokn’s built-in content review and approval process changed that. “In the past, we wanted to bring employee voices into our training, but it felt risky,” Ellisen shared.
“Spokn provides the level of control we need to ensure our content aligns with our brand and values while still feeling authentic.””
In the experience-driven hospitality industry, a strong and consistent visual brand builds credibility, emotional connection, and differentiation—not just for guests, but also for employees. Spokn’s streamlined branding features ensured that every video matched IHG’s brand identity with a single click.
Perhaps most importantly, Spokn’s format proved highly effective. In hospitality, a trainer’s credibility often depends on their proximity to the realities of hotel operations. Spokn helped bridge the gap for corporate-based learning architects by bringing in voices directly from the field.
Additionally, the bite-sized format of Spokn videos was ideal for busy employees with unpredictable schedules. As Ellisen put it: “We know that our employees consume social-style short-form video in their personal lives. They’re learning from peers and influencers outside of work. Spokn enabled us to build learning content that aligns with those trends: short, engaging, and delivered by peers in the field.”
Learning is the heart and soul of Udemy. The company is committed to continuous improvement, both by leveraging its own courses as well as specialized learning programs like mentoring and new manager training. Given the exceptional learning opportunities that Udemy offers, ensuring employees are aware of them and excited to take part is crucially important.
“Spokn became a valuable tool for promoting our own initiatives through learner testimonials, like participants in mentorship cohorts describing the benefits and Udemates sharing their favorite Udemy courses,” Genefa explained. “Udemates responded differently when hearing from their peers, as they described the impact of investing time in these programs.”
Through its partnership with Spokn, IHG is making learning faster, more relatable, and deeply embedded in company culture. Now, training at IHG is enriched by real stories and authentic peer-driven learning experiences.
Ellisen summed it up: “The best way to teach great service is to let your own people do the talking. Spokn makes that possible. And beyond training, it’s also become a way for us to celebrate our people and bring teams together in ways we never expected.”
IHG’s success with Spokn illustrates a powerful shift: when learning is authentic and peer-driven, engagement follows. In a business built on human connection, the voices of employees have become one of IHG’s greatest learning assets.
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