Official Transcript

Intro – 00:00:02: Welcome to The Hotel Moment podcast, presented by Revinate, the podcast where we talk to leaders in the hospitality industry. If you’re looking for trends, perspectives, and stories from leaders in travel and hospitality, you’re in the right place.

Karen – 00:00:23: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Hotel Moment podcast. I am your host, Karen Stephens, the Chief Revenue Officer of Revinate. And today, I am very excited to be joined by Ellis Connolly, Chief Revenue Officer at Laasie, which is an AI loyalty booking platform. Ellis comes to us with a SaaS background and more than 15 years of success in the field. He’s built sales playbooks and KPIs for startups and large enterprise companies alike, and is a popular speaker in our industry. You may have seen him on one of his talks yourself. We’re especially excited to speak to Ellis because Laasie is a Revinate partner. Welcome to the podcast, Ellis.

Ellis – 00:01:00: Karen, so happy to be here and so excited that we got our partnership and integration launched. Lots of great stuff there.

Karen – 00:01:08: Well, you know what? I second that because we really are in the sweet spot. Both of our companies are targeting the same customer base that really, really needs your services as a loyalty player. So we definitely want to dig in here. The topic today – guest loyalty, how to retain it, how the opinions of loyalty programs have changed over the years, and just digital transformation and hospitality in general. So let’s dive right in. Okay, so Ellis, our industry is constantly growing and evolving around us, but for you, what are the foundations of good hospitality experience, and what has always stayed the same?

Ellis – 00:01:45: I feel like that’s a loaded question. Look, we’ve heard this phrase, high-tech, high-touch, within our industry for quite some time now. And I do think there’s a lot of truth in letting a guest choose the path of hospitality and service that they are most comfortable and open to. Now, looking at chain scale from ultra-luxury down to economy brands, is that going to be different across that scale? Of course. But I think the power of choice is a huge piece of what drives hospitality. Now, that’s the actioning behind technology that supports it. At the end of the day, we’re still in the hotel business or the hospitality business. So, you know, the basic fundamentals of connecting with people, the 80-20 rule or the 10-20 rule, if you’re within 10 feet of someone, smile and say hello. If you’re within 20 feet of someone, always give a smile, right?  Those like basic fundamentals of making guests and people feel good. I think are always going to be steadfast in hospitality. Now what’s going to change a lot, and I think companies like Revinate, obviously us at Laasie, I think we’re at the forefront of really understanding what guests want and then how we can operationalize or prepare a hotel to operationalize and be impactful to go and do those things. So I think there’s a lot there to discuss.

Karen – 00:03:22: Yeah, absolutely. So let’s maybe take a step back for our listeners who aren’t familiar with Laasie. Just talk a little bit about what does an AI loyalty platform mean? So what is the core of what you do?

Ellis – 00:03:35: Yeah, and we get that question a lot. The other question, Karen, that we get a lot that I’ll start with is, why do you spell Laasie with two A’s? And Laasie, it’s named after the dog for loyalty and intelligence. That’s kind of our play. But Laasie, we spell it with two A’s, L-A-A-S-I-E, and it is the acronym for “loyalty as a service”. So we get that out of the way. I probably miss thousands of emails because people just spell it like the regular way they spell Lassie, but we’ll cross that bridge another day. So what we do at the core of our product is we have created a reward ecosystem that allows hoteliers, and vacation rental groups, and other operators to come into that environment and pull content out and deliver that content to drive customer actions. Now, what we’ve done is we’ve incentivized over a billion dollars worth of reservations. So we sit on this really rich set of data that allows us to say, “Okay, this guest is booking over these dates at this rate code, this season of the year, this pattern during the week at this ADR in this type of market. And we’ve seen this multiple times and we can provide an optimized mix of reward content that we think would have the highest propensity of selection rate for that guest.” Now, that can incorporate on-property reward content, but where we’ve created our moat is, Laasie has gone out and has negotiated with over a thousand merchant partners to feed rewards and content into our environment. And that’s really one of our key differentiators that sets us apart. The other piece is that we’ve built a ton of loyalty technology and integration framework, as you know, that lives all around the outside of that. So all of your enrollment capabilities, all of your preferences and capabilities, which you guys know very well about, and then all of that guest-facing portal where someone’s going to log in to see their reward content, to see their reservations. So we have all your commonalities of a loyalty tech built around this amazing network of reward content, which has the AI nucleus that sits in the middle of it.

Karen – 00:05:53: Wow, that is so cool. And I think you really hit on something there. It’s about really personalizing that experience. And you can draw a lot of inferences, as you mentioned, based on the hotel, the market it’s in, the time of year, the rate code they’re booking, to kind of encourage that guest to make that conversion. And then tell me a little bit more about the portal. Because I think we see this a lot kind of in the mid-market. Loyalty programs, traditionally, if we take a step back, we just think at a macro level, when you just had big point systems with big brands. The main reason, and this is my assumption, so you can correct me if you feel differently, but I think that loyalty programs came into play because big hotel companies needed to understand who that guest was. And the only way for me to know who you are is to attach a number to you because I can’t figure that out any other way traditionally, right? I couldn’t figure it out. I couldn’t string your bookings together. The data was all over the place. So if I have a loyalty number I can attach, you can acquire points. And of course, if I’m a huge brand, then you can redeem those points for loyalty stays all over the world. I’ve got 30,000 rooms. So pick wherever you want to go, right? But for your smaller hotel groups, which by the way, are niche and beautiful and right in our sweet spot of our customer base, we think about loyalty a little bit differently. So can you just talk a little bit about why a platform like Laasie that has kind of a variety of rewards and different things is good for that mid-market?

Ellis – 00:07:23: Yeah, happy to. And we at Laasie subscribe to that same exact notion, Karen, which is a big loyalty points-based program based on the geographical breadth of the volume of rooms and properties makes more sense. But when you come down in scale and size – And maybe you don’t have that breadth of geography. Maybe you don’t have guests who are going to stay 250 nights from a road warrior perspective. And let’s go back and just touch on that for a second. The driver of loyalty programs for the big brands is the road warrior. That is 100% the driver of those programs. But when you step into our sweet spot, like Revinate’s, we’ve got hotels that are extremely unique, that are tied to their communities, that are promoting not just their hotel, but the street, the block, the neighborhood. And big boxes will say that they do that. But in reality, it’s the independents that are really driving that destination experience. With Laasie, what we’ve really been able to do is step outside just the guest stay at the hotel. We think about a trip, whether it be business or leisure or ‘bleisure’ or whatever term we’re going to come up with in our industry next year for what that is. It’s not just about what I’m going to be able to do at the hotel. All those things are important. I’m not discrediting that. Like getting a guest to come to the hotel, getting them to spend more share of their wallet with your ancillary outlets. Yes, we want to be able to support that. And we do support those things, as do you guys with your email marketing and some of your other things. But what if there were unique experiences that were in the market that you could propose as reward content for someone traveling? Now you’re not just giving somebody points. You’re not just giving somebody a credit for parking. Again, not discrediting that strategy because there’s revenue that sits behind that. So we know that’s a part of what we need to do as well. And we do this for some of our properties. I’ll use Miami and we have some joint customers down there. I’m not going to share who they are, but I think we know. What about a sunset yacht experience, right? That you have velvet rope access to. There’s still going to be a cost to it. But you at the hotel are providing value to that partner that you’ve had a relationship with for 10 years, right? And now that guest, when they go down and stay at that Miami hotel, yes, it was amazing. We had a great sushi dinner. That’s my little hint there. And then we went on this amazing sunset cruise. What do you think they’re going to talk about most when they come back from that trip?

Karen – 00:10:02: Let’s say experiences. Yeah.

Ellis – 00:10:04: Yeah. And then, what do we think is an industry tie? Because there’s two types of loyalty that we think about. There’s that parking fee loyalty, which is transactional. And then there’s the emotional piece to that. And I think what Laasie does really well is we’re able to really blend those two to tie both together your transactional and your emotional loyalty. So you get full circle on making that guest feel really good, making the guest feel that we’ve thought about them as a hotel and what we want to offer them from a reward content. And then we give them things to experience outside of just staying in your hotel.

Karen – 00:10:43: Yeah, I speak to a lot of guests here on the podcast that hotel companies that really are thinking about the experience first in terms of the content that they drive on the websites to making sure that the hotel sits in the center of that experience. So it’s the local flavor, the local art, local music, whatever it might be. So this is a really powerful tie-in. And so let’s just talk about when you do get a new customer, how do you start to work with them to think about what their loyalty offering should be? I mean, you take me through once you onboard with Laasie, what does your team do to make sure that the program that gets offered is right in the sweet spot?

Ellis – 00:11:24: Yeah. And obviously, Karen, it varies between property to property, group to group, market by market. But throughout our entire process of engaging with a group, working them through, let’s call it the sales process, for lack of a better term, and then getting them into implementation and onboarding. Consistently throughout that conversation, we are always workshopping with those customers about really like three core strategies that we think about at Laasie. And the first core strategy that we really help deploy is growth in database. So what is your enrollment strategy? And where are the touch points whether it be digitally or on property or post day, where you have an opportunity to engage guests to enroll them into your program? Because let’s be real, the more members you have in a program, the more opportunities you have to generate revenue. Now, do we just want to go out and pay ad hoc for members that we don’t think are going to convert? No. So there’s tactics that we believe that sit in there that help you engage enrollments that are going to be the highest converting members. We’ve got a few things that we look at there. So that’s kind of usually where we start is in that enrollment. And we’re integrated to all of the major booking engines. So there’s enrolling, single sign-on on and inline enrollment capabilities. So all that stuff, we kind of piece together workflow it out. So you can see where all those touchpoints are. And then we move into workshopping around your reward strategy. What local rewards in your markets does Laasie have available for you to incorporate into your rewards catalog? What on-property reward content do you want to feed into our ecosystem? And we’ve got a whole reward manager team that helps support that, gives ideas and tactics and strategies, expiration strategies. There’s a whole piece that sits behind that. We try to make it very easy. There were over 2,000 hotels now on the Laasie product. So it’s a very known onboarding process for us. And then we start talking about engagement strategies. So it’s enrollments, it’s rewards, and then it’s engagement. What type of outcomes do you want to provide from this program? And how do we communicate to these guests? Obviously, our integration with Revinate is a big piece of how we support some of that stuff. If you’re not on Revinate, we can do it through our platform as well, but definitely go through Revinate because there’s a ton of things that we can support there. And then the final piece of this is the enrichment part. And I think this is where I get most excited about our partnership with Revinate, which is once you start looking at all the great data that Revinate’s collecting, and then you start looking at all the great data that Laasie is collecting around, think about something like if I’m a guest and you know my love for athleisure wear this year, Karen.

Karen – 00:14:22: This is your new resolution.

Ellis – 00:14:23: This is my new resolution.

Karen – 00:14:24: I mean, Ellis and I had a long conversation about athleisure wear. Done with the pocket squares. We’re into athleisure wear.

Ellis – 00:14:32: That’s it. It’s about how do we take reward content that is aligning guests to specific types of experiences, maybe even down to specific type of brands, and then allow the hotelier to leverage that data to re-engage with those guests with content to help email open rates, click-through rates, and driving more revenue? And I’ll give you an example. Ellis books a hotel in Miami. He selects aloe yoga and an outdoor walking tour experience, right? So now I know that Ellis may have a propensity for other brands that are similar to Alo that may be incorporated into the Laasie ecosystem. By no means am I in great shape, but he does an outdoor fitness-type experience. So maybe I have yoga on the roof, or maybe I have some other types of things that I’m offering at my hotel. And this sits on the more wellness side. But now how do I incorporate that into Ellis’ profile to better segment, using big, good CRM terms here, to better segment guests and leverage reward content to get them to take actions?

Karen – 00:15:46: Awesome. And what you’re hitting on there, our new favorite buzzword for 2024, zero-party data. So, I mean, first-party data was all the buzz. We’ve been talking about it for years because, you know, Google is moving over. You’re not going to be able to use third-party cookies. You need to use first-party data. But Ellis, you just kind of defined it for us. But what is the high-level definition of zero-party data and why is it so important?

Ellis – 00:16:10: Well, it’s important because now we’re going to need it more than ever to help move the needle in traditional email marketing strategies, which is a massive driver of revenue for a hotel. But first-party data is going a layer deeper to really try to understand the preferences of what a guest likes, wants, needs, and expects. I think that’s a big piece. And it goes beyond phone number, gender, birth date, anniversary, and the typical things that we would see in a hotel profile. As you said, Karen, we’ve been talking about, you know, the cookies crumbling and all these different strategies and tactics around the collection process of first-party data. But the thing that we believe at Laasie, and this is true to our core, is that incentives drive behavior. And if you’re a hotel that has a website that buries a sign-up in the footer of your website. That’s traditional hotel. You have this gorgeous website, amazing content, maybe there’s a pop-up or a content modal that pops up here and there, but way down in the bottom of the footer, it says sign up for the newsletter and we’ll send you some specials or offers, right? Our philosophy is raise that up above the fold, make it exciting, create an incentive for somebody to enroll into your program, make that incentive be valuable, right? I recently wrote an article that said, “Gone are the days of free bottled water and internet in order to drive loyalty members”, right? Now don’t get me wrong.

Karen – 00:17:46: I mean, it’s laughable, isn’t it? But that was really a thing.

Ellis – 00:17:50: It was really a thing. And don’t get me wrong, right? Marriott was brilliant for doing that. You want internet? Enroll into our program. Now they’ve got 140 million members. It drives 60% of their total revenue. Like, fantastic. It works. But we don’t operate on that scale for a lot of our hotels. And we do have hotels that leverage Laasie in that internet signup process. So that tactic still works. But offer something of value to them that aligns with your property, that resonates with your brand, and makes them think about you when they’re not staying at the hotel. I think, Karen, you and I might be different. We probably spend more time on hotel websites than most people do. My wife, when she’s booking a hotel, she goes to the website, she makes a booking. She may pop to an OTA. Let’s not talk about the path to purchase, but in general, she makes a booking. We get the confirmation. It’s an independent hotel. And then that’s it. She doesn’t go back to the website, maybe a day before we stay, but there’s not a lot of interaction. So what are the things that we could do there? Obviously, email marketing strategy, and pre-arrival strategies. But what if they had some amazing reward content that they could redeem 48 hours or seven days before their stay because they need to align on some of their experiences? So now you get them thinking about your property. At the end of the day, you try to get them thinking about an experience, but spending more money with you.

Karen – 00:19:16: Yeah, absolutely. And I think you brought up something there with OTAs. OTAs have loyalty programs. OTAs have ways to do all of these things. So if you as a hotelier are not offering a solution on your own site, you’re really missing something there, right?

Ellis – 00:19:32: There’s so much there. And they spend, I mean, it’s all documented. They spend so much money on loyalty. But like, I think about some of the things that I see and that’s top of funnel, right? Like obviously OTAs, all the big players are spending tons of money on performance marketing strategies and billions of dollars to Google. And you see all the headlines around that. But where can we, as the middle market, the independent, the small to medium-sized groups, where can we really compete? And there’s some very simple tactics that we’re already producing good results in that we could amplify even more. Think about meta. Think about the mid-of-funnel strategy. You’ve already got somebody in meta. They’re already looking at your property. If you’re getting the bid and you’re in the top one or two, you have the opportunity to inject content into that hotel extension. If you look at all the big players, they talk about what? They talk about their loyalty program. Loyalty members get 10% off or free cancellation. That’s the other one you see, right? So what we’ve started having our hoteliers do is incorporate, get rewards, or call out a specific piece of reward content. All of those little things can help drive conversions in that channel. Again, these are little things, little tactical things that as you’re building the bricks of an acquisition strategy, if you’re going to do loyalty, you want to talk about it from the top of the funnel all the way down to the conversion at the end of the funnel. And what does that story look like? And there are things that we do at Laasie that help with the continuity of that. If you’re going after a certain target in a certain market through your pay-per-click or your targeted ads on Facebook or whatever it may be, and it’s a very specific reward to a specific market, we’ll make sure that reward follows from that UTM all the way through that path to purchase and make sure that you get what they’re supposed to get.

Karen – 00:21:27: Right. Wow, that is really cool. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit, Ellis, because it’s not often that I have another CRO, another Chief Revenue Officer of a SaaS company on this podcast. I think one thing that we’re starting to see a lot of, I’ve had a lot of discussions on the pod about commercial strategy, about aligning sales and marketing teams. So can you talk a little bit about how you think about that in your own company? Because I do think that it parallels into hotels. I think that revenue and sales and marketing, they might have been a little bit disparate in the past, but they’re starting to move a strategy a little closer together. So can you just talk a little bit about how you think about that on your own company, sales and marketing teams working together?

Ellis – 00:22:16: Yeah. And I can remember years ago, I was with a revenue management company and we leading commercial for them. And we did a user conference. It’s at the Fontainebleau in Miami, actually. We did a user conference, and the title of the conference was “Marketing and Sales: The New Power Couple.” I think from my perspective, when I think about like, “What are our go-to-market motions”, right? And, “How do we make it the biggest impact with the smallest budgets in the most efficient ways possible?” Content, content, content on the marketing side of the universe. And you’re doing it here with the pod. You guys do an amazing job of pushing out email marketing content at different segments because I’m signed up for a couple of different newsletters. So we’re doing some of those same tactics and strategies there. Our weekly newsletter probably drives, I don’t know, 15 demos per month for us on net new customers. And then we have a very tight partner strategy. Where we as a 50-person profitable SaaS company, we do need to lean sometimes an existing integration framework in order for Laasie to really provide a ton of value, right? And it’s like, if you have Revinate and you have one of the integrated booking engines that we’re on, and you have one of the integrated PMSs that we’re on, like it is almost a no-brainer if you don’t have a loyalty strategy to put Laasie in. So I digress. Content, content, content, follow up on that content. We have an SDR strategy put into place based on engagement with that content that goes out. And then we have a couple of different motions based on ICPs around what type of pitch we’re going to give that person and where we start in our process. I think one of the things that I learned pretty early on when I came to Laasie, I’ve been here two years now, is that some hoteliers are scared of the word loyalty. And scared in the sense of operationalizing it. So if you switch out some terminology in your content and you change the word loyalty to guest recognition, all of a sudden it becomes a very much easier conversation to penetrate accounts and move a little bit further down the path. And not to be cliche, but we’ve really outlined like a crawl, walk, run, go to market because loyalty for a 600-room hotel on the beach in Fort Lauderdale is probably not the same as what someone in Dubuque, Iowa with a really sweet 54- room boutique hotel, two completely different strategies, two different places you’re probably going to start. And the beauty of Laasie is that we’ve got products that we can plug in and fit to help support both of those. So I don’t know if I answered your question, but it’s content, content, content. On the sales side, pick that up, follow up with engaged prospects, and then try to move the needle once we get through that. That’s very SaaS-driven.

Karen – 00:25:26: No, that’s it. It was a SaaS question. So, you know.

Ellis – 00:25:29: Commercial strategy in hotel, I do love how the terms evolve over time, right? It’s like first it’s revenue management. Then like seven, eight years ago, it became like revenue strategy. And then it’s like sales and marketing. And then everything rolls up and now it’s commercial strategy. So I’m excited to see, you know, in two years what the new term is going to be.

Karen – 00:25:53: Yeah. And I think at the end of the day, it has been interesting to see how all of those, what used to be kind of disparate departments are working together hand in hand. My role as CRO at Revinate, I actually have customer success under my realm as well, because the handoff from sales into launch and into success and the whole nine yards is so key and important. It’s no longer like, “Oh, I’m just a sales engine. And then I send it over the fence and somebody else takes it over.” I like to call it, you break it, you buy it. So we make sure that everything we sell is going to be successful and make that customer a long-term customer.

Ellis – 00:26:31: And that it’s funny because we have those conversations. And yes, there’s that handoff, but looking from the top of it, it’s about tying to revenue.

Karen – 00:26:42: 100%. Yeah, that’s why, you know, it’s like if you have a champion that bought your product and service, you want to make sure that you make that champion look like a million bucks and get a million bucks as soon as possible. That’s great. Okay, I have one last question for you. So reflecting on your journey, what crucial piece of advice would you give to aspiring leaders in the hospitality industry? And just to say that Ellis has been at a number of different hospitality companies, it seems like every time you go somewhere, there’s a cool exit. So you must be a lucky guy. You’ve been at a number of, maybe you want to just give a rundown of the companies you’ve been to, and then we can finish with what advice would you give?

Ellis – 00:27:23: Yeah, so I was lucky enough to find myself at Cvent when it got very exciting there. And then I was at TrustYou, as Karen knows. And we had a really solid exit there. I was with them about five years as chief revenue. And then Rainmaker. And although I wasn’t there at the time, Rainmaker exited to Cendyn. It was still a good time. And Zingle was another player that I was at that was a very quick exit to Medallia. And now I’m at Laasie. I did spend some time at Sabre. No exit there. All the rumors around that was fun and exciting as well.

Karen – 00:27:59: I spent some time at Sabre too. So-

Ellis – 00:28:02: Yeah, everyone earns their stripes at one of the big reds, as they say, Sabre, Oracle. And now I’m at Laasie. And honestly, Karen, I am enjoying this so much. It such a fun, unique — we’re completely remote distributed company and we’re growing like crazy. So that’s fun. Those are fun things. We’re figuring out things sometimes on the fly, which we’re going to have to do. But I would say over the last year, 18 months, we’ve really matured as a company, as an organization. And I think I can’t share anything right now. And you know some of this, but you’ll be getting to hear and see some of these things in market in the next couple of weeks around some of the customers we’ve acquired and kind of what we’ve been up to. So it’s exciting times. When you say like one piece of advice for aspiring leaders or folks that are trying to get in to do this in the SaaS or startup or big company, whatever it is, I think I have a saying that’s like, relentlessly pursue anything that you want. And if you take that and you put it through the lens of sales, it could be relentlessly pursue leads. If you put it into the customer success context, it’s relentlessly pursue your customer and their needs. I think if you’re your true self and you’re authentic, and I know this sounds hokey, but if you do the right thing all the time, like I think I’ve done a really good job. I’ve made a lot of friends. I haven’t made many enemies on purpose because I think there’s enough out there for all of us to go and do and be successful and do exciting things. And this industry, especially in hospitality and travel technology, it looks really big and it powers trillions of dollars worth of economic impact. But when you get down to it, the circle gets pretty small of the companies and the organizations and the players that are making everything move. So you always want to be right on that side of the circle, let’s say.

Karen – 00:29:59: That’s right. And I love the reference to, you know, be your authentic self, figure out what really drives you, what brings you joy, and keep your eye focused on that. And then it’s a great ride, isn’t it? I mean, it’s a lot of fun.

Ellis – 00:30:11: It is. Now, I’ll say this. There’s times where it’s a grind. And you think you see the light at the end. And then as you think you’re getting there, it just keeps moving further and further away. Those are the times when it matters who your colleagues are. It matters. You hear these terms like the “Sunday scaries” and all this stuff. I still get excited to get up and come to work on Monday. I’m like, “Hey, let’s go. I’m ready to go.” I think as long as you have that passion and you put in the time and the energy and the effort, you can be successful.

Karen – 00:30:48: Yeah, absolutely. You know what? I also consider myself very blessed in that regard. I work with amazing people. I love our culture. It keeps me going. And we like to say, man, we have grit and resilience. And between those two things, we can survive just about everything. And we have. I mean, to come out, you know, the tech companies that are still standing here after COVID and after everything we’ve been in through in this industry in the last couple of years, and it really pumps down to the people you work with and your resilience.

Ellis – 00:31:16: Well, I mean, Karen, what I knew Revinate as going back was review analytics, survey, right? That’s where we kind of played in the same space. And to see from then till now, like what you guys are doing, it’s amazing.

Karen – 00:31:34: Oh, well, thank you. And more to come. Like you said, we’ve got a lot happening this year. So speaking of which, if you’d like to meet Ellis in person, he will be at our conference at the Fontainebleau in Miami, April 22nd to 24th. So come see us at NAVIGATE. And Ellis, it has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for joining me today.

Ellis – 00:31:53: You too, Karen. Thank you.

Outro – 00:31:55: Thank you for listening to The Hotel Moment Podcast. Make sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you’re watching on YouTube, please like the video and subscribe for more content. For more information, head to hotelmomentpodcast.com. The Hotel Moment Podcast is presented by Revinate.

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