Phocuswright 2015: Personalisation remains the exception in the hotel sector, claims Revinate

Phocuswright 2015: Personalisation remains the exception in the hotel sector, claims Revinate

Personalisation remains the exception rather than the rule in the hotel sector, despite them delivering the last mile of the guest’s travelling experience.

Personalisation remains the exception rather than the rule in the hotel sector, despite them delivering the last mile of the guest’s travelling experience.

Winner of Phocuswright’s Travel Innovation Summit 2015 award for the most innovative established company, Revinate told the annual conference in Florida last week that hotels are struggling to make sense of data.

Josh Steinitz, vice president of global business development, said: “The sad truth is personalisation is really the exception rather than the rule, despite the fact hotels really should know about you.

“There is a lot of challenges with using guest data often because it resides in silos. Without the tools to understand and act upon it this data is effectively useless.

“Most hotels do not have access to teams of data analysts to drive insights.

“Hotels are delivering the last mile of the guest experience and we are unlocking the door to the guest experience and guest insights. It’s the democratisation of big data to the hospitality industry.

“We believe knowing and understanding your guests must be at the heart of a hotel’s strategy.”

Steinitz said Revinate connects millions of data points that provide hotels with rich customer profiles from which they can personalise the guest experience.

He said an improved arrivals and check-in service, offering room upgrades based on the data and targeted email campaigns all allow hotels to have a direct customer relationship.

One hotel partner derived $750,000 in directly attributable revenue from a campaign with a 27% open rate and on average partners see a 10 to 1 return on investment, claimed Steinitz.

“We believe to win in a highly competitive market, hotels must reinvent themselves and not just think about their value as room inventory but their guest databases,” he said.

“We think of ourselves as the pacemaker after a heart transplant, we are the intelligence layer that extracts that information out.”