The brand

IHG® Hotels & Resorts is one of the world’s leading hotel companies, with around 325,000 colleagues working across more than 100 countries to deliver True Hospitality for Good. But IHG’s strength goes beyond providing great hospitality for guests on property. In fact, IHG’s corporate vision is to build a digital advantage. This focus on digital goes beyond the stay and impacts how IHG connects with guests across their entire journey.

The challenge

With the hospitality industry still recovering from the pandemic and STR predicting that the Australian hospitality market won’t recover until at least 2025, IHG’s vision to build a digital advantage is proving critical to success as its hoteliers are forced to think creatively about how best to deploy resources. The hotel market, especially in Australia, is incredibly competitive, with 5-star luxury hotels competing for guests who traditionally stay at 4-star hotels. As a result, one of IHG Australia’s Area Directors of Sales and Marketing, knew that their hotels wouldn’t be successful unless they found a new digital strategy to compete.

The solution

Prior to Revinate, the cluster of hotels had been using multiple vendors and platforms to communicate with guests. While the group was able to get the job done with platforms that didn’t seamlessly share data or sync with the PMS in real time, the process could be resource-intensive and time-consuming. Most importantly, the results weren’t as effective as they could be. When the team saw that Revinate Marketing could offer the functionality that he needed to communicate with guests and drive direct bookings in a one-stop-shop, they made the switch.

With Revinate, the team was able to do more than just consolidate tools. Revinate introduced agility, sophistication and ease-of-use to the guest marketing process. As the industry recovers, the hotels can provide consistent communication with guests throughout their journey, thanks to Revinate’s automated emails, which sync in real time with the PMS.

IHG Australia’s Area Director of Sales & Marketing says, “In this type of market, you need to leverage any advantage you have. For us, Revinate is that advantage. Because we can easily reach our database in a highly personalized way at just the right time, we can drive repeat business, positively impact the customer journey and increase loyalty with no acquisition costs.”

The hotels, which span NSW, QLD, ACT, and VIC, leverage Revinate’s advanced segmentation features for success. One targeted past guests from specific locations with a special offer for a winter stay. Another targeted family travelers and encouraged them to visit during the school break. The latter campaign achieved an impressive 44% open rate and 3% click-through rate.

Because Revinate was purpose-built to support groups with multiple brands, IHG Australia can centralize communication to guests while ensuring brand consistency with easy-to-use templates and tools. Revinate’s automation functionality removes the manual work involved in sending pre-stay, on-premise, and post-stay emails, saving time and allowing staff to focus on more strategic tasks.

The team says, “Revinate is the most efficient and effective solution for guest marketing. We are so much faster and more agile today, which allows our marketing teams to spend time on furthering our strategic priorities.”

The results:

In the last 6 months, clusters of IHG hotels in Australia have been able to outperform their competition by using Revinate as a digital advantage. Because segmentation and personalization is so much easier with Revinate, the group has outperformed the industry average across all traditional email KPIs. Some include:

• 27% average email open rate, which is +8% better than the industry average
• An average of 100 room nights booked per campaign (in the last six months)
• 3% average click rate, performing above the industry average
• $31,000 as the average revenue per campaign (in the last six months)

To learn how you can achieve results like IHG Australia, reach out today for a custom consultation.