The brand

Calabash Hotel is a family-run, luxury boutique hotel with gracious island hospitality, located on the shores of the Caribbean Sea. A Relais & Châteaux hotel, Calabash Hotel delivers an unparalleled guest experience and luxurious accommodations. The hotel has won numerous awards and accolades, including World Travel Award’s Leading Boutique Hotel in Grenada and Top 10 Hotels in the Caribbean by Conde Nast Traveler.

The challenge

Calabash’s marketing strategy focused on engaging guests with meaningful content and making them feel part of the story, versus simply sending promotional emails to drive revenue. However, they encountered several challenges in bringing this strategy to life.

To start, the hotel struggled with outdated and inadequate design tools, hindering their ability to create visually appealing and compelling marketing materials that would capture the attention of their recipients. Building and maintaining a comprehensive customer database was another challenge, making it difficult to personalize marketing campaigns and target specific audience segments effectively.

The hotel also struggled with a persistently high bounce rate, resulting in missed opportunities for guest engagement. Finally, Calabash faced a lack of visibility into the performance of their marketing initiatives, particularly in terms of revenue generation, making it challenging to assess the effectiveness of their campaigns.

The solution

In March of 2021, Calabash Hotel turned to Revinate Marketing to help transform their guest marketing. With Revinate’s intuitive and powerful design tools, anyone at the hotel — regardless of design expertise — could create visually stunning and engaging marketing materials befitting the luxury brand.

By integrating with Calabash’s PMS, Revinate streamlines the process of building and organizing the hotel’s customer database, allowing for accurate segmentation and personalized communication with guests. With segmentation and personalization, the hotel can regularly send targeted campaigns that exceed industry benchmarks for open and click-through rates. Some examples of these targeted segments include geo-location, loyalty members, and trade professionals. In addition, the hotel utilizes Revinate’s automation features to send We Miss You (featured) and Departure campaigns, which have driven more than $250K in direct bookings.

With Revinate Marketing’s built-in database health reporting, Calabash can easily see the impact of bad data and rectify it by collecting email addresses upon check-in and leveraging Revinate’s data cleansing technology to maintain good data health. These efforts significantly reduced their high bounce rate and ensure that messages reached the intended audience.

Moreover, Revinate’s sophisticated reporting tools provide Calabash with invaluable insights into the performance of their marketing campaigns, especially in terms of revenue generation. This newfound visibility empowers the hotel to assess the impact of their strategies, identify successful initiatives, and refine their approach based on real-time data.

The results

By leveraging Revinate Marketing, Calabash not only overcame their challenges but also optimized their marketing efforts, leading to significant revenue growth, higher guest engagement, and a stronger competitive edge in the market. Campaign performance highlights include:

• More than $250K in direct bookings
• Lifetime revenue: $3.1M
• Average open rate: 40%
• Average room revenue: $28K YTD per marketing campaign
• Average room nights: 32 room nights per marketing campaign