Forbes Travel Guide Scales Luxury Hospitality Training Globally With Articulate Localization

El reto

Scale a robust course library across languages—efficiently and cost-effectively

Forbes Travel Guide’s online training journey began in 2022, when the organization launched its own LMS—The Academy by Forbes Travel Guide—and selected Articulate 360 as its authoring platform. A small but dedicated L&D team of four started building an online training library aligned to the exact behaviors evaluated in a FTG Star Rating. 

Today, that library spans 30 courses covering a full hotel, restaurant, and spa environment, including housekeeping, food and beverage, front office, concierge, and spa services. This breadth of content gives partner properties a self-service option to complement FTG’s well-established instructor-led training programs.

Once the hotel course library was complete, a new challenge quickly surfaced. Partner properties and the global sales team began asking the same question: Can we get this training in other languages? Requests came in for Spanish, French, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, and more. 

But William Avitia, VP, Learning Products & Services, pushed back on the instinct to simply localize based on the property’s location. The language a workforce actually needs isn’t always the same as the location—a hotel in Dubai, for example, may need Filipino or Hindi before Arabic, because the people doing the work often come from the Philippines, India, and Singapore. That insight shaped how FTG approached prioritization: Language decisions would be driven by workforce demographics and engagement data, not geography or sales pressure.

“As a business, we understand how important learning in your own language is,” says Avitia. “We knew subtitles or voice dubbing in another language wouldn’t cut it—to reach learners effectively, we needed to entirely localize the content.” 

The existing translation approach wasn’t built to handle this volume of requests. At the time, FTG relied on an external vendor for translation work, at a cost of roughly $10,000 to localize a single learning plan of three to four courses. This meant that translating the full hotel curriculum would have cost around $50,000 and taken up to five months per program, including project management, sourcing voice actors, and multiple review rounds. 

Scaling that model across an entire hotel curriculum and, eventually, into new verticals like ocean cruises and luxury certifications, simply wasn’t viable. FTG needed a new strategy to take its  global training to the next level.

La respuesta

Build training that travels with Articulate Localization

When Articulate launched Localization, FTG moved quickly to explore it. Engagement data confirmed that Spanish was a clear starting point as Forbes Travel Guide’s most-requested language after English.

From there, the team built a deliberate, end-to-end translation approach using Articulate 360 and Localization. Rather than cherry-picking individual courses by topic or department, Avitia made the call to translate complete programs at once, starting with housekeeping, food and beverage, and front office. This allowed partner properties and the sales team to communicate a clean, consistent offering. Two validators are assigned to each program: One takes a primary pass, a second catches anything missed. Features like embedded voiceover translation and bulk text corrections across matching screens have meaningfully reduced the time validators spend on each course.

The content itself was built to support this approach. Avitia’s team builds courses in Storyline with voiceover, on-screen text, and scenario-based interactivities rather than traditional knowledge checks. This puts learners in realistic situations and asks them to respond, rather than memorize. At the end of each section, learners complete a learning journal that they can save, print, or share with a manager as a coaching tool. And because FTG’s standards are refreshed every year, the team designed everything to be agile enough to update without rebuilding from scratch.

That digital library was designed from the start to work in tandem with Forbes Travel Guide’s instructor-led training—not replace it. Online training serves as the foundation, giving every learner the same baseline before an instructor enters the room. 

FTG will launch localized courses in Mandarin Chinese this summer. Avitia plans to apply the lessons learned from localizing the Spanish courses by building a formal onboarding process for his Asia Pacific translators before they begin validating course content.

Desbloquear el potencial humano

A global course library, a measurable difference

The impact of moving translation in-house with Articulate Localization was monumental, resulting in over 75% cost savings and 90% time savings while translating the majority of its hotel course library into Spanish. The shift has made it feasible to translate every course in the library, including smaller microcourses, rather than making difficult triage decisions about what gets translated and what doesn’t. 

“Articulate Localization helps open the door to new territories and new markets that we may not be in from an instructor-led training perspective,” says Avitia.

Forbes Travel Guide’s data shows the value of making training accessible in the first place. Properties whose employees complete online training arrive better prepared, giving instructors more time for role-playing exercises and hands-on practice rather than foundational content. And for properties that layer multiple training solutions—in-person and e-learning—the cumulative effect shows up directly in their Star Rating evaluations.

Partner feedback has been enthusiastic, particularly from Latin America and Spanish-speaking learners in the southern US. Analytics from the Academy reveal that even learners at Spanish-speaking properties frequently toggle between Spanish and English during a course, using the training not just for job skills but to practice the working language of their environment. That flexibility reflects something Avitia has long believed: that language is a matter of personal choice as much as practical need, and that giving learners the option improves how they engage with the material.

With Mandarin Chinese localization launching this summer and new verticals like ocean cruises on the horizon, the library is set to grow in both reach and depth. At its core, FTG’s localization work is about closing the gap between a Five-Star standard and the people responsible for delivering it every day—in whatever language they learn best in.

With Articulate Localization, Forbes Travel Guide built a scalable, in-house localization program that cuts translation costs by over 75% and extends world-class hospitality training to frontline workers across regions and languages.