One of the facilities that customers want today is to be able to share an experience that they enjoyed with their loved ones – and it’s especially true for hotel guests. For example, if someone enjoyed a spa session in a hotel, they might want their loved ones to experience the same and they want to be able to gift it to them somehow.
A gift experience is typically any experience or service that a hotel provides and which one can gift to someone or buy for themselves in form of a voucher. It can be an overnight stay, a meal in a restaurant, an afternoon tea, a spa treatment, a round of golf or a combo package.
No matter how big or small a hotel is, a gift voucher service fills a need for the hotel’s customers. For the hotel itself, it can drive sales and increase revenue by just offering the property’s existing products and services as gifts.
With an emerging demand for gift vouchers, companies like Enjovia have started providing specialised online systems that enable hotels to retail and manage their gift voucher module. These gift voucher websites link to the hotel’s main website and are branded to look like the hotel’s website, so customers feel they are buying directly from the hotel which gives them confidence about the services they are buying.
Customers can choose from a customised range of products, the content for which is managed by the hotel. Customers pay securely online or using cash/cheque in case they are buying from the hotel premises with money going to hotel’s bank and/or PayPal account. Customers send the gift vouchers to themselves or their loved ones via email, via a variety of postage and packaging options, or they can collect it from the hotel itself. These systems also take care of the redemption side when the recipient brings their vouchers in.
What an advantage for the hotel – it’s an online system that lets people buy gift vouchers for their loved ones and even for themselves – plus it puts money straight to the hotel’s bank account upfront! The system gives the hotel more customers, more sales and builds brand awareness. Customers who come to the hotel to redeem their gift vouchers also end up spending more on food and drinks etc. and if they like their experience, they will most likely buy the same experience for someone else. Furthermore, 5-10% of these vouchers are never redeemed, which means free money for the hotel.
For a small amount of money for these fully managed gift voucher systems, hotels can open a new revenue stream without actually adding any new services.
If all of the above makes good sense, one thing to bear in mind is not just ticking the box by getting any gift voucher system, but getting the best system in the market that will last for a while. Having a system that allows transactions to simply go through the website isn’t enough. If you are familiar with the terms ‘user experience’ and ‘predictive data analytics’, then it’s not very hard to understand that if you want to be ahead in the game, you need to provide your customers with a flawless user experience and also use the power of machine learning and rich analytics to see patterns like what are people buying. A systems is needed that will clarify what products are selling and what are not. Also, considering that more people today like to shop on their mobile phones and tablets, the voucher system should look good on all devices so that the hotel doesn’t lose out on sales when mobile devices are being used.
For example, the prestigious Celtic Manor Resort’ in Wales (which was the host to the NATO Summit 2014) uses a gift voucher system. It produced more than £1.4 million worth of gift voucher sales in 2014. They have a huge range of products and services, a good voucher system (and most likely superheroes in their marketing team), but it definitely shows the impact of gift vouchers can have to sales revenue.
The Celtic Manor’s gift experience website powered by Enjovia. View it by going to Celtic Manor Resort’s website and clicking on Gift Experiences.
