The brand

Headquartered in Australia, View Hotels operates in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane today, but the company will soon expand into global markets after refurbishments are complete. The hotel group is currently working on a complete brand overhaul, led by New York based creative director Margaret Huerta. She describes the new brand as, “a representation of effortless style; sophistication with just the right amount of grit.”

The challenge

But when Covid-19 hit Australia and travel slowed to a trickle, Will Seggos, the Digital Strategy and Technology Director, knew he had to focus on driving domestic revenue in order to keep the company’s larger plans in motion. He found his magic bullet in Revinate Marketing, and within a month of launching the solution, drove $110k in revenue attributed to Revinate, and saw June’s website channel production increase 18% over the previous year. And, these results came after cutting marketing expenses by 90%.

The solution

Will decided to move the hotel group from MailChimp to Revinate Marketing after analyzing his channel spend and ROI and seeing the value of email. He was aware of the solution because the group had been using Revinate Surveys to capture guest feedback, boost their organic online presence and support meta search. Unsubscribe rates have since dropped by 27%, click rates have more than doubled, and open rates on room offer e-blasts have reached as high as 62% since the migration.

The move to Revinate Marketing coincided with some other technology changes at the company, including a switch to a modern PMS in an effort to centralize all guest data. Being based out of Park City, Utah, the need to migrate all guest data into the cloud was critical for his ability to leverage guest insights into dollars and cents. With Infor and Revinate Marketing, Will was able to do more segmentation, personalization and track attribution. He says, “With Revinate Marketing, I was able to focus on nurturing past guests, who were incredibly receptive to hearing from us. We have utilized Database Insights to implement new check-in procedures that have supported an increase in our email capture rate to 92%. Our success has been a group effort supported by our revenue, sales, and front office teams. Bookings from this segment have allowed us to drive significant revenue, even with Covid-19 and bush fires in Australia.”

The results

The revenue generated through email in June is even more impressive when you consider that View Hotels wasn’t even planning to go live with Revinate until July 1. The integration work was finished ahead of schedule and Will had no problem jumping into Revinate Marketing as soon as he had access. Will says, “I work with a lot of technology partners and it’s pretty unheard of to go live a month earlier than expected AND drive positive ROI on your first month. The fact that I didn’t even need training, although it was offered, is a testament to how easy and well designed the product is. I couldn’t be happier.”

In fact, after driving the hotel’s blended marketing ROI from less than 5x to 25x with Revinate, Will is already looking to add additional Revinate features such as upsell and drip campaigns. Given that View Hotels was able to double the share of direct bookings in just one month, during a rebrand and global pandemic, there’s no doubt that this is a group to watch.