We caught up with Kelly Robb and colleagues at HITEC 2016 to discuss the challenges hoteliers face and the role the CRM plays in supporting the desire for direct bookings as well as supporting customer service.
“There is so much talk about reducing OTA commissions and there are many opinions on how you can get there, but it really does start with having a holistic view, unifying data sources and creating a strategy specific to each hotel. OTA’s are not going away, so we challenge hoteliers to think about the true cost of guest acquisition,” says Kelly Robb, Director of Market Intelligence at Revinate.
The challenge
If you think about merchant commissions, they’re often not showing up in the P&L, as the OTA is cutting a cheque direct to the hotel. If anything, they are showing up as revenue. Sales and Marketing budgets might be more limited, so all your efforts to drive direct bookings are also showing up in that line item, making differentiation between the direct and indirect cost of acquisition and revenue unclear.
Rather than looking at OTA commissions as a problem, hoteliers may choose to consider commissions as a cost of acquisition. The first step is to quantify and understand the magnitude of the commissions payable to OTAs.
Quantifying the true spend on OTA commissions and tracking that over time will assist in understanding the true dependency on OTAs. Hoteliers may then consider strategically reinvesting part of the commissions into direct booking acquisition.
The Revinate solution
The hospitality technology landscape is becoming increasingly fragmented and commoditised, with a wide range of PMS solutions. As the PMS typically does not provide a rich guest profile, individual applications are required for all areas of hotel management and marketing functions. Having data in many different places, typically makes it expensive and complicated for hoteliers to gain a comprehensive understanding of their customers. A comprehensive CRM integrating all guest information into a single dashboard provides an overall picture of guests, market segments and channels. Most CRMs were developed about 15-20 years ago – they started with CRM, and gradually added surveys and dabbled with reputation management.
Revinate, started as a reputation tool, building surveys and then connecting with PMS providers. We then added social data actions from the mobile app, which helps to build up a very rich guest profile. Revinate now extends beyond reputation service management, offering unification of data and a platform of integrated services. The solution delivers a full range of marketing functionality including targeted marketing campaigns. The unified data platform also assists operational staff to service guests through recognition and delivery of guest specific services.
Recent developments
Recent enhancements to the Revinate solution include customizable dashboards, presenting different metrics and views based on the requirements of the department and role.
Currently Revinate provides arrival reports with a range of information including, for example, VIP data alerting staff to capture emails that will allow communication to guests in the future. The two-way connection with a number of PMS providers delivers insights back to staff to enabling personalization of services at the point of guest contact.
Revinate partners with TripAdvisor and recently launched a partnership with Google Publishing. As Google is at the top of the funnel, hoteliers have access to enormous quantities of data and assets in the ecosystem, allowing hotels to reach their guests online. The new Revinate marketing product also supports smaller and independent hotels, enabling them to collect valuable feedback and see great results. Revinate is a global solution provider providing services to customers in their own time zones with offices in San Francisco, Amsterdam and Singapore.
