The brand

Steeped in history, Billesley Manor Hotel & Spa is located on 11 acres of Warwickshire parkland, 5 miles from Stratford-upon-Avon. It’s grade II listed and famous for hosting Sir William Shakespeare in 1599.

Today, Billesley Manor Hotel & Spa is an inspiring retreat where guests receive the highest level of service and personalized touches, which create a sense of calm and escape.

The challenge

Following the pandemic, Laura Cherrington, Director of Sales and Marketing, found that the hotel’s booking window shrunk considerably. Guests were wary about booking hotel stays far in advance and were instead booking within the same week of travel.

This made it hard to predict future capacity, revenue, and occupancy rates. Laura needed a predictable source of direct revenue to ensure she met her goals.

The solution

A Revinate customer since 2018, Billesley Manor Hotel & Spa turned to Revinate Marketing to help drive direct bookings. Leveraging the segmentation filters in Revinate Marketing, Laura filtered by radius to uncover past guests in the drive-to market and added the “safe mode” filter to ensure that only guests with legitimate interest were targeted — this ensures GDPR compliance.

Laura excluded guests with future stays to avoid having to do rate adjustments for guests that booked at a higher rate.

Additionally, Laura created a host of upsell opportunities in Revinate Marketing, ranging from wine to flowers in the room. These offers, which are automatically sent to guests prior to check-in, allow the hotel to increase direct revenue with little effort or staff intervention.

Laura also leverages the OTA winback and “we miss you” automated campaigns in Revinate Marketing to drive past OTA bookers to book direct and encourage repeat business. These campaigns require almost no maintenance once they’re activated, and serve as an always-on revenue channel.

Recognizing the value of the hotel’s guest data in driving direct revenue, Billesley Manor Hotel & Spa leverages the Arrivals Report to see which guests checking in don’t have email addresses associated with their profiles. The Reception Manager is able to ask for the email, so that the hotel can reach out with offers and capture the booking directly next time.

The report also highlights the guests’ stay histories, ensuring that returning guests are warmly greeted and thanked for their loyalty.

The results

With Revinate Marketing, Billesley Manor Hotel & Spa was able to increase direct bookings by 77% from January 2022 to January 2023 and also increase revenue by more than 198%. In the process, Revinate has lessened the hotel’s reliance on OTAs and established a predictable channel of revenue.

“I speak with other hoteliers in my local market and everyone is tasked with driving direct bookings,” Laura says. “I’m thrilled that I have Revinate to help me succeed in my job by making it easy to capture direct revenue.”