Horseshoe Bay Resort is a luxury spa, golf, and tennis resort on the shore of Lake LBJ in Texas. It attracts guests from the Houston, Dallas Ft. Worth, San Antonio, and Austin markets and is a favorite destination for weddings and corporate events. It also boasts four Robert Trent Jones Championship golf courses and offers many packages for families, singles, and sportsmen.
On December 29, 2013, the 349-room AAA Four-Diamond resort in the Texas Hill Country launched independent operations.
Horseshoe Bay Resort relied on its strong management and operations teams when it left its franchise.
"You lose corporate support when you go independent," said Bryan Woodward, CMO for Horseshoe Bay Resort. "We had to take over everything from telephone systems to establishing new contracts with Expedia, Kayak, and our other OTAs. Getting the phones to ring is job one. How you look on Yelp and Google is important. We leveraged media outlets to educate past guests and tell our markets about the change and how they could find us online."
The hotel implemented NAVIS Narrowcast for reservation call center sales and marketing data analysis services. NAVIS also assisted the property's independent transition with reservation sales training, rollover call services, and tracking for marketing program effectiveness. NAVIS placed two reservation professionals on property to support Horseshoe Bay Resort during its cut-over.
Access to guest records
The positives of being independent definitely outweigh the negatives, according to Woodward. "One benefit of independence is that we own our guest database," he said. "NAVIS collects a huge amount of caller data. We have been an indie for about two months and I just downloaded a large number of guest records from NAVIS for our marketing programs. I know who our guests are and why they stay with us. I was not able to access this information from our franchisor."
Monitor marketing campaigns
NAVIS provides a unique 800 number for each of Horseshoe Bay Resort's marketing programs to track effectiveness. "NAVIS enables us to monitor the success of every campaign real-time," Woodward said. "We see revenue and conversions by channel. I can tell you exactly how many phone calls we receive for each campaign and the PPC ROI. I leverage this information to put my marketing budget in the most successful campaigns. We could never have done this when we were flagged."
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