The brand

IPP HOTELS is a collection of 8 properties in Austria. Each one is unique and offers something different to travelers, whether it’s luxury amenities at Hotel Landgut & SPA Althof Retz or an affordable place to lay your head in Austria at Hotel I’m Inn Wieselburg or the arte Hotels in Vienna and Salzburg.

The challenge

When Covid-19 hit in 2020, the team at IPP HOTELS had time to evaluate their marketing technology. Specifically, they looked into whether their tools were enough to support their end goal of leveraging a centralized data platform along with a unified marketing solution to communicate with guests for all properties.

Across 8 properties, IPP HOTELS was using 3 booking engines. As a result, guest data was spread across several databases — and there was no easy way to centralize it.

Hotels were on their own when it came to running promotions with email marketing. As a brand, they sent a templated monthly newsletter that was difficult to personalize.

The corporate team knew that to effectively market to their guests, they would need a single solution to house guest profiles, plus the segmentation tools that would allow them to communicate in a targeted way. On top of that, managing guest data was tricky with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) standards.

The solution

IPP HOTELS’ Marketing Director, Markus Hann, recalled a conversation he had with a Revinate representative at an expo in 2019, and they reconnected in 2020 to discuss the solution. He’s glad he made that decision.

“Revinate Marketing could drive revenue by delivering personalized campaigns and upsell offers for rooms and amenities through targeted guest segmentation,” Hann says. “And as part of the implementation process, Revinate would bring all our guest data together on a single platform and make it easy to remain GDPR compliant. I was sold and decided to move forward”.

The results

After a quick implementation, the IPP HOTELS team was trained and began developing automated campaigns. With all data finally de-duplicated and unified into Revinate’s single Guest Data Platform, the brand was able to centralize marketing, allowing hotels to focus on their on-property guests.

Lisa Schober, Public Relations Assistant at IPP HOTELS, explains the immediate benefits of Revinate.

“The first thing I noticed was how easy it was to create a newsletter in Revinate Marketing,” she says. “Our previous newsletter required a strict template that left little room for creativity or brand expression. With Revinate, it’s easy to create great-looking newsletters that represent our brand.”

The newsletter is now driving trackable recurring revenue and generates an average of €8,000 per send. With a clean database, the engagement rates are also impressive. The newsletters now have a 28% open rate and a 3% click-through rate.

Recognizing the power of being able to send personalized emails, Schober immediately began working on capturing guest preferences, including whether they tended to travel for work, for pleasure, alone, or with their families or pets. She also captured what their hobbies were. With this information, Schober can send more targeted campaigns that are more likely to convert.

With consolidated guest data, Schober has a complete view of all guests across the brand and can better understand her top segments and most important customers.

The team saw the following results after just 18 months:

• An average of €11,000 of direct revenue per campaign sent
• 106 room nights generated per campaign
• An average open rate of 28%
• An average click-through rate of 3%

Finally, with Revinate Marketing, the brand was able to create automated campaigns to win back OTA guests and upsell guests who already have stays booked.

In addition, they leverage an automated birthday campaign through Revinate to send good wishes and a voucher. The campaign has been running for less than a year and has already generated 136 room nights — thanks in large part to a 45% open rate.