Introduction
La Quinta Inn & Suites by Wyndham Nashville Airport offers 134 rooms, two event spaces, and four suites. Guests also enjoy a full hot breakfast that goes beyond Wyndham's standard, plus a free airport shuttle running daily into the evening. The property came under new ownership four years ago and completed a full renovation in spring 2024. It partners with Sojern across display, social, and email, with Sojern providing ad design for every channel.
Samantha Burke, Regional Director of Sales and Marketing, oversees marketing across nine properties in the portfolio, including this one. She picked up Sojern for the Nashville Airport property as renovations were wrapping up, then expanded the relationship property by property and channel by channel as results held up.
Objectives
Before Sojern, the property leaned on OTA visibility and Wyndham's brand-level marketing, with no dedicated resource for direct-booking campaigns. Email marketing was limited to personal outreach: Burke maintained her own list of past group and wedding-block contacts and sent quarterly updates by hand. With a lean, GM-led team and no in-house creative resource, the property needed a way to reach travelers directly without adding fixed marketing cost or headcount.
"You guys handle everything... it was super simple to get set up and get started and running. Other than monthly reconciliations, that's all we have to worry about — you guys handle everything else."
Solution
Sojern's commission-based model gave the property a way to test the waters before committing a budget. Burke piloted Email on Commission at one unbranded sister property first, largely to see how it would perform and whether it would create friction with guests, before rolling it out across the Nashville Airport property and the rest of the portfolio.
The pricing structure made the decision straightforward. Email on Commission costs the same as the property's Display commission and applies only to confirmed bookings. That landed below the 15–18% the property pays OTAs like Expedia and Booking.com. It also came without the virtual-card and payment-authorization friction that comes with OTA check-ins. As Burke put it, expanding with Sojern “was a no-brainer” versus paying a higher OTA commission for the same booking.
For Burke, the biggest benefit has been how little the partnership asks of her team day to day. Sojern designs the email creative and display ads, incorporates the property's amenities and selling points, and keeps campaigns running with minimal input required beyond monthly reconciliation.
The property has grown from OTA-dependent visibility to a top-30 ranking among Nashville's 300-plus hotels on TripAdvisor. Based on that track record, Burke has continued adding properties and channels to the Sojern relationship, including plans to bring an additional extended-stay property and a newly branded location onto Email on Commission.
About the Partnership
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"You guys handle everything... it was super simple to get set up and get started and running. Other than monthly reconciliations, that's all we have to worry about — you guys handle everything else."
