Summary

• Problem Canva solves: Canva enables Expedia Group teams to maintain brand consistency, streamline and collaborate on projects, onboard new staff, and launch a global rebrand with ease.
• Canva features and templates used: Brand Kit, Resize & Magic Switch, Magic Expand, Frames, Background Remover, Presentations, Video Editor.
• Expedia Group teams using Canva: Brand; Marketing; Facilities; Communications; Social; PR; Employer, Corporate, Talent Brand; Inclusion Business Groups.
  

ROI

• Expedia Group saves over 7,800 design hours per year with Canva.
• Teams create videos in Canva in three hours rather than three days.
• Internal asset approval now takes under three hours compared to two days.
• Teams have seen a 93% reduction in design review times since implementing Canva.
  

About Expedia Group

Expedia Group⁠(opens in a new tab or window) powers travel for everyone, everywhere through their global platform. Providing industry-leading technology, Expedia Group enables memorable experiences for travelers across their family of travel brands including, Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Vrbo.com, Wotif.com, and more. With over 20 years of industry experience, Expedia Group is a trusted and renowned global travel company.

The Challenge

When you’re a global travel brand like Expedia Group, visual identity is critical to communicating your brand and creating trust with customers.

With 16,000 employees in office and hybrid locations across the world, monitoring the quality of branded content created internally and externally, became a big challenge for the travel company.

Angela Watterson is Expedia Group’s Senior Brand Designer on the Global Communications team.

“Everyone in the organization has to have the ability to create assets on their own, but very few of our teams have graphic designers assigned to them, so there were a lot of brand inconsistencies happening,” she says.

This meant Expedia Group employees often produced work with varying degrees of professional polish, resulting in an inconsistent brand presence. In addition, branded templates, logos, and assets were stored across multiple locations, making it difficult for teams to locate quickly.

“Our biggest bottleneck was our brand assets being scattered between different platforms,” adds Molly Martin, Expedia Group’s Art Director.

Without a centralized design system in place, once team members located the assets, they often accidentally overwrote the master templates. It ultimately fell to the Brand team to regularly recreate and upload design templates across multiple online locations, straining precious resources.

“Many projects were turned away or rejected because our teams would not have the capacity to start them,” says Angella.

The rollout of a company-wide rebrand presented its own set of challenges. With a new visual identity ready for launch, ensuring everyone used approved templates and resources correctly became tricky.

Seeking to scale creative services and make teams self-sufficient with visual on-brand content, Expedia Group decided to establish their design workflows on Canva.

The Solution

Expedia Group introduced Canva Enterprise⁠(opens in a new tab or window) in October 2022 and hasn’t looked back.

Employees immediately had access to a library of branded templates and design assets within Canva. This meant the wider company could confidently create content and accurately express the Expedia Group brand.

Teams could easily locate assets and correct fonts within the centralized Brand Kit. That meant stretched-out logos in incorrect colors became a thing of the past, giving the in-house design team peace of mind.

“Designs started looking like they were part of our design system when we moved over to Canva, which upheld our new visual identity,” says Molly.

A smooth Canva onboarding experience

Canva’s Customer Success team stepped in to ensure a smooth rollout right across the company, supporting regular onboarding and training sessions so teams felt confident working within the platform.

“A Canva advisor hosted monthly Canva Office hours for our team and they have been so valuable in educating our entire company on the benefits of Canva,” Molly says.

“They are always right there to answer questions. Their support has been the reason we stick with Canva. We're always learning something new and it feels like our Canva Advisor is part of our team.”

“Canva has revolutionized our design workflows, which allows us to focus on more strategic projects,” says Molly.

How Canva boosts productivity and saves time

As the centralized source for Expedia Group’s visual communication materials, Canva saves teams significant time by allowing them to operate more autonomously and boosting productivity across the board.

The Employer Brand team uses Canva to rapidly create newsletters, quarterly reports, and promotional material for recruiting events, paid media, and more.

Before Canva, the Facilities team would use complicated design software to create all visual content, chewing up precious time in the process.

Sean Dudley is Expedia Group’s Global Communications Manager within the Facilities team. His team oversees all brand signage and messaging across Expedia Group’s 90 office locations, ensuring communications stays consistent and localized for each market.

“If we had an event we wanted to advertise in digital signage, previously this could take a couple of days of internal back and forth,” he says.

Since making the switch to Canva, Sean says design time has dropped by 93 percent, from an average of six hours to just 30 minutes.

“My content team of 30 are saving four to five hours of design time per week per person thanks to Canva and our pre-made templates.”

Combined with the 10 hours Rebekah's team saves each week, Expedia Group's creative team is saving over 160 hours of design time every week – or 7,840 hours combined per year – thanks to Canva.

And approval times have been sliced from days to hours, with Sean admitting his team is saving a full day per week, or 416 hours annually using Canva.

“Now, a design might take an hour to create and, depending on who’s online, 30 minutes to approve,” Sean says. “We can have designs online by the end of the day, whereas before it could have taken days to complete revisions.”

The ability to rapidly convert digital signage to Slack reminders and physical flyers has cut down turnaround times from an eight-hour day to 20 minutes. This remarkable efficiency is thanks to Resize & Magic Switch, a feature that seamlessly resizes designs for different platforms.

“With Resize & Magic Switch, we’re able to create one design and then easily format it for a variety of different mediums,” says Sean.

Canva’s real-time collaboration also enables staff to work more effectively across multiple time zones, improving review times and fast-tracking content creation.

“I'm often sharing a design and having real-time feedback as people pop into a design,” says Rebekah.

“Canva has made our workflow collaborative. If someone wants to tweak a design, we’re now able to provide shareable links.”

Fast and cost-effective video production

Canva has also made creating quality short-form video content a breeze for the Expedia Group team.

Canva’s auto-generated video captions are a huge time saver as well.

“One of the biggest things is the auto-captioning feature in Canva,” says Molly. “We strive to have captions on every single video we make, whether that's shown live, or on a website. That has cut down so much time.”

“It feels like Canva has saved years off my life!”

Expedia Group produces videos for event recaps, day-in-the-life vignettes, and interviews. Since implementing Canva they’ve been able to bring video content creation in-house, and increase their output.

“A big time-saver is that teams can now create their own videos using Canva,” says Sean. “This has saved us a lot of money if were to use an outside agency.”

The marquee digital screens in their company cafeteria, which previously displayed only ambient footage, now feature travel video loops the team edits easily within Canva. Thanks to Canva these videos can easily be updated with new footage within ten minutes.

Molly also adds any images that need enhancing to fit a certain layout are easily edited and resized to scale using Canva’s Magic Expand feature, saving the team a ton of time.

“Video is tough to make, and most of the time you need a deep understanding of video editing software,” says Molly. “But Canva makes editing videos so intuitive. It's as if I have been a video editor my whole life with Canva.”

Faster onboarding for the next generation

Expedia Group has found innovative ways to harness Canva for staff onboarding.

During Expedia Week, the Employee Events and Experiences team used Canva Presentations to revamp the internal onboarding playbook, their guide for training new team members. Now their branding and comms training has shrunk from a four-hour overview to taking just two hours.

Sean says using Frames in the Canva editor made this possible. “The concept of Frames–dragging and dropping an image into a layout–has allowed me to teach non-designers in one second versus trying to throw a shape into a custom design and crop it to fit,” he says.

Expedia Group uses Canva for a variety of other onboarding moments. New staff learn how to create newsletters, insight reports, flyers, display and print ads, plus how to generate visuals for company announcements. Every job gets done in Canva, with on-brand visual content every time.

Expedia Group’s use of Canva demonstrates its versatility and how a company can significantly streamline corporate visual communications.

Canva helps Expedia Group teams collaborate, produce visual on-brand content, and onboard employees across the globe, increasing agility, creativity, and efficiency more than ever before.

“Any business thinking about utilizing Canva, I absolutely recommend it,” says Sean. “You're going to save time, you’re going to create stronger products and you're going to turn people into designers. I can’t imagine going back.”