Secret Escapes is a leading luxury travel platform that inspires individuals worldwide to explore travel deals across over 80 countries. Founded in 2010, Secret Escapes has grown to serve over 60 million users globally, dedicated to offering the best range and value in luxury travel and experience deals at lower prices, with a portfolio of 4,000 hotel-only and package offers. Their Global editorial team is dedicated to creating informative and engaging content that resonates with their diverse audience. As part of their ongoing efforts to scale and enhance their operations, the company sought to modernize its localization process and make it more scalable as they grow.
A growing requirement for a higher volume of multilingual content emerged at Secret Escapes, demanding a solution that prioritized both scale and cost efficiency. Secret Escapes' prior approach, emphasizing highly localized content creation by individual editorial teams working independently, effectively catered to specific market nuances, though it presented overtime challenges in achieving overall efficiency, scalability, and consistency. The lack of a centralized translation process and the heavy reliance on external resources meant that scaling content production was costly and time-consuming. The company needed a solution that could improve efficiency while maintaining the high quality and tone of voice that made the brand successful.
The key business goals behind the translation strategy were to achieve scalability, reduce costs, and ensure faster turnaround times for translations, especially for new promotions and content updates. There was a growing need to automate repetitive tasks and create a more streamlined, cost-effective workflow. With a dedicated editorial team working across multiple languages, the company sought a translation partner that could support both efficiency and the retention of its strong brand identity and voice across different markets. In addition, they wanted to shift their internal translation resources from tactical execution to strategic planning and implementation.
To scale its localization efforts, Secret Escapes partnered with Smartling, utilizing its translation management system (TMS) and machine translation (MT) capabilities. The company began by training Smartling’s MT engine for Italian and Dutch, followed in just a few months by German. The Italian model achieved near-human translation quality, a significant improvement over previous methods. This success led to further testing with Smartling’s AI Toolkit, which enhanced the flow of inspirational content, ensuring translations were emotionally engaging for readers.
The introduction of MT, combined with Smartling’s TMS, greatly increased efficiency. By automating manual tasks and integrating a human-in-the-loop approach, in-house translators could focus on strategic localization, adapting content to cultural nuances while preserving the brand’s unique voice. Smartling’s TMS also centralized project management, streamlining workflows and allowing the editorial team to take a more proactive role in localization. This shift led to substantial time and cost savings.
Secret Escapes reduced the average time spent on new hotel deal translation by 25% across all languages, and for the best performing languages (like Italian and Dutch) a further reduction of 15% was achieved. In addition, the Global editorial team significantly reduced the time spent on back-and-forth communication between editorial and translation teams, eliminating delays across all projects. This allowed the team to scale up a new social media strategy and support a 20% increase in marketing campaigns, all without increasing freelancing costs.
Smartling’s Customer Success team was essential during onboarding and the transition, helping Secret Escapes fully leverage the platform’s capabilities. Looking ahead, the company plans to expand its use of trained MT engines and AI to streamline localization in more languages. Additionally, they aim to roll out an API in the coming months, which will eliminate manual intervention in their CMS and allow the team to manage translations directly in Smartling, further enhancing efficiency.