One of our clients, The Esplanade Hotel, Newquay in Cornwall is a fantastic example of how an Inspire Loyalty Programme has generated guest loyalty for their business and they are reaping the benefits.
All About The Fresh Sea Air And Returning Guests
The Esplanade Hotel is a picturesque and contemporary hotel overlooking the world famous Fistral Beach in Newquay. It’s a place where guests come back again and again, to enjoy quality family holidays on the Cornwall coast, splashing about in the heated indoor pool and dining together in their family friendly restaurant.
Remembering Their Regular Guests
Looking after their regular guests has always been a key part of the ethos at The Esplanade. Generation after generation stay with them and they love welcoming guests back every year. We have been working with this hotel and it’s sister properties Fistral Beach (Newquay) and Boringdon Hall (Plymouth) for over two years and have developed a robust loyalty programme to communicate with their guest database, including management of member services.
Their loyalty programme includes
- Branded loyalty website
- Monthly emails to members informing of points balance, news and exclusive member offers
- Integration with their PMS provided by Hotel Perfect
- Integrated loyalty app and contactless guest experience by our preferred partner Criton
Registered members automatically receive points for every £1 spent during their stay which they can accumulate and redeem for a variety of reward voucher codes and access exclusive offers and best room availability ahead of the general public!
“The way people book has changed to mainly online reservations so we find the best way to express our gratitude to our loyal guests is through the loyalty scheme. This gives you best exclusive availability and the lowest prices in advance of their general release.” The Esplanade Hotel
It’s set up so that once a guest builds up their points, they can discover redeemable gift experiences to enjoy during their next stay. Points can be spent on experience gift vouchers which can be redeemed for Sunday lunch, a bottle of Prosecco, spa treatment, a meal in their restaurant or a surf lesson!
Congrats On 4-Star Accreditation!
We cannot write this blog without mentioning that during lockdown the hotel has been working hard on refurbishing and upgrading facilities and are very much open for business. As a result of their hard work, they recently undertook an inspection and received their official accreditation of a 4-star hotel. Well done to the team who worked tirelessly to ensure their guests have the best possible experience which has pushed them up to the next level!
Guest Loyalty Programmes With Inspire Loyalty
Don’t have a guest loyalty programme? Or have a database of guests but aren’t doing anything with it? We can set you up with a loyalty programme, just like we do for The Esplanade.
With a branded rewards platform and mini CRM, we can entice your guests to join your unique club, with customised rewards and exclusive offers – a great way to switch more direct bookings and engage with your loyal guests.
All we need to get you started on a 3 month FREE trial is your logo, images and brand identity guidelines. We’ll set you up within 4 weeks and connect all the components together. And, our member services team will be ready to react to member enquiries, to ensure we offer as good a service as you’re renowned for.
A guest loyalty programme for your hospitality businesses is without a doubt a worthwhile activity for you to run. If you value your customers, it makes sense for you to thank them for choosing your venue over your competitors.
A way to show your thanks for their business, is by offering them rewards that enhance their current stay or give them a better experience for their next one. You are doing this to show your guest that they made the right decision and that they should come back to you and book direct in the future.
Guest loyalty programmes come in many different forms and will need to be tailored to your guests. Ultimately you decide what will suit your business, but there are many advantages to having a well-run guest loyalty programme.
6 Reasons Why You Need A Guest Loyalty Programme
- Enhanced Guest Experience – Having a guest loyalty program will mean returning guests who come to stay at your hotel are never overlooked. They will be recognised and taken care of, making their trip more memorable and enjoyable.
- Increased Bookings – Sometimes the promise of rewards or perks are enough to get the undecided guest to book with you. It’s not just for returning guests, but can also come in very handy for attracting new guests.
- Cost Effectiveness – It’s more likely that loyal, repeat guests will book again at your hotel directly, especially if you are offering exclusive member offers through your loyalty programme. This is much cheaper than trying to find new guests, saving OTA commission.
- Increased Revenue – returning guests mean they have been happy with their experience and are more likely to spend more on extras and additional services too. Proving you can offer a good service with recognition over and over again, means guests will be happy to keep spending money and refer their experience to others.
- Valuable Insights – having a guest loyalty programme means you can collect more data on your guests than ever before. You’ll get to know their likes, dislikes and behaviour which can be very useful for future planning and also extremely valuable for attracting similar new guests to your business.
- Improved Customer Engagement – The data provided by a loyalty programme means you know who your customers are and how to contact them. You can communicate with them on a regular basis for example by email, keeping them aware of your offers and activity, which in turn encourages loyalty and advocacy for your brand.
Guest Loyalty Programmes With Inspire Loyalty
Don’t miss out on these opportunities to grow your business. We offer loyalty programmes for hospitality that are really easy to set up.
With a branded rewards platform and mini CRM, we can entice your guests to join your unique club, with customised rewards and exclusive offers – a great way to switch more direct bookings and engage with your loyal guests.
All we need to get you started on a 3 month free trial is your logo, images and brand identity guidelines. We’ll set you up within 4 weeks and connect all the components together. And, our member services team will be ready to react to member enquiries, to ensure we offer as good a service as you’re renowned for.
Incentives can go a long way to cement relationships, initiating an engagement in your product or brand in the form of a reward for behaviour. This mechanism or exchange provides the beneficiary with the feel good value factor, often resulting in higher sales and repeat behaviour, or a cycle of continued loyalty to the brand.
What’s In It For Me?
Put simply, it’s commonly known as WIFM (What’s in It For Me) like a bargaining or negotiating tactic. If I do this for you, what’s in it for me? It’s written in our DNA going back to childhood when a parent might use a reward for demonstrating good behaviour or achieving a goal.
Grow Relationships With Data Collection
It would be short sighted to simply hand over an instant reward for purchase without further engaging with the buyer who made the purchase. So in order to start a dialogue and grow relationships, you need to ensure some data is collected from the start.
As with loyalty, when a mutually beneficial exchange happens, most people don’t mind providing their information so you can keep in touch to ensure the relationship prospers. You get more sales and they get more rewards. This is a key ingredient in any form of reward because without it you can’t provide full recognition and continue to communicate about your product developments, including special offers.
Influencing The Sale
Inspire Loyalty provide reward and recognition programmes for hospitality in the form of guest loyalty. Members experience the product and return for more, or they are enticed to visit a hotel or restaurant for the first time, to a venue they might not have considered before loyalty was introduced. This is quite different from an incentive programme, where the buyer is the influencer and not the person who experiences the product, which is certainly the case for bookers.
Bookers are intrinsically attracted to incentives, and it’s a competitive audience to capture due to various incentives offered in the marketplace. Some companies solely rely on the strength of their brand and product to sell their proposition, but rightly or wrongly the incentive is the motivator, the WIFM, which often acts as the tipping point to influence the purchase.
Yes, the booker firstly has to have confidence in the product, service and experience which they are recommending, since after all that’s what their objective is when representing the buyer, but when a gift or reward is thrown in for good measure, it can often seal the deal.
Recognition
We would love to rest on the laurel that saying thank you goes a long way, but from our experience, to influence sales you need to go an extra step and provide some form of physical gratitude too. It’s a great reminder of your brand, that if the booker receives a gift they’ll have the opportunity to enjoy their own memorable experience from something you’ve given them, and that could be a bottle of wine, a retail gift code such as John Lewis, Waitrose, Amazon or Love2Shop (or any relevant partner in their geographical area) or a contribution towards experiencing your own product, dependent on the cost of sale. Whatever the choice of reward, it needs to be meaningful and worthwhile in recognition of the achievement by the booker – giving you business.
Lifetime Value
Don’t just look at the cost, consider the return on investment. A higher redemption rate means higher engagement, which is 93% for one of our clients! If you allocate a budget of 5% or 10% of a sale towards the reward, it doesn’t take great maths to work out you’ll keep 95% or 90% of the booking value, with a high chance you’ll continue to get more business from the same booker over the long term, otherwise known as customer lifetime value. So it’s easy to measure success and remember you only pay out when the business comes in.
Build Your Loyalty Programme With Us
Inspire Loyalty equip bookers and influencers near and far with branded incentive programmes, translated to the native tongue including Oceania Cruises UK, Germany, Australia and New Zealand; Swiss International Hotels and Resorts EMEA and Silversea.
Stand out from the crowd and incentivise your business today.
Adapting To Change
As we find ourselves once again under new guidelines and restrictions, hospitality venues across the UK and Ireland are closed until February. A situation that would have seemed unbelievable this time last year!
Enhanced cleaning protocols, changes to how guests are served for check in, check out and a whole new food and beverage experience for everyone, are all adaptions venues have had to implement to remain open within local restrictions.
Adding Value
Many venues are taking the time to refocus, innovate and plan for the future and we are supporting them all the way. The Inspire Loyalty Programmes are so much more than a rewards programme, where customers collect and redeem points. Our clients place value on how our bespoke loyalty programmes help them nurture their relationship with guests, enhance the guest experience and secure repeat and direct business.
A recent survey from one of our hotel clients, Manor House Loyalty in Staffordshire, highlighted that of respondents:
- 68% were influenced to book direct due to their rewards programme
- 95% find member’s statement useful
- 90% satisfied their enquiry was efficiently dealt with by member services
We have long established venues as our clients, who have been with us many years and value the benefits Inspire Loyalty Programmes give them:
Nurturing Relationships With Members
This has never been more evident in the monthly email statements that hotels send out to members through us. This essential communication channel helps maximise relationships and keeps venues front of mind during the pandemic. They are a useful tool for informing members that venues are COVID compliant and giving guests the confidence to come back to venues when the time is right for them.
We have many examples of how venues are leveraging their monthly statements:
- Fistral Beach Hotel in Cornwall are encouraging members to plan experiences to look forward to by offering a discount code to upgrade from an economy room to a standard room and also receive double points.
- Swinton Estate in Yorkshire are promoting their gift vouchers to give as Christmas presents to your loved ones.
- The Old Inn in Northern Ireland have used our statements to promote their click and collect food ordering service from their restaurant and to send members a discount code
Vantage Loyalty
In addition to getting an easy to install, branded loyalty programme, once signed up to Inspire Loyalty, clients are also included in our new consumer facing brand, Vantage Loyalty. It has been set up to help attract more customers to our clients’ unique loyalty programmes, increasing exposure for them and offering extra benefits to their members.
Through Vantage we are reinforcing the message that when venues are permitted to open, they all have COVID measures in place to make the guest experience as relaxing, safe and as inviting as possible.
Build Your Loyalty Programme With Us – Free 6 Month Trial!
We’re here to help our hospitality clients achieve greater guest retention, better experience and increased revenue in these uncertain times. Our aim is to equip as many hotel, restaurant and apartment operators with an easy to apply branded loyalty solution to collect powerful data, enhance guest engagement, increase visitor numbers and direct booking initiatives.
With Inspire Loyalty you can easily develop your own bespoke loyalty programme. We provide:
- Loyalty website in your brand identity
- Easy to use loyalty app and/or cards in your brand identity
- Exclusive member offer access area to promote member rate codes and added value
- Optional integration with your payment provider or property management system
- Multi-site point redemption
- Personalised monthly email statements to members
- Member services with 24-hour response to member and staff enquiries
- Dashboard with reporting suite
- Loyalty survey tool
- Data storage in a secure GDPR compliant environment
- Representation with social marketing on www.vantagehotels.co.uk
- Option to run a staff incentive programme with your own product rewards and/or retail codes i.e Amazon, Waitrose, Love2Shop etc
If you don’t have a loyalty programme and want the tools to start building loyalty to reward and engage, especially in the current climate, join us on a free 6 month trial period.
Just how important are loyalty programs to hotels? According to Deloitte, roughly 18% of frequent travellers become loyal to a hotel brand primarily because of its rewards program. The Center for Hospitality Research at Cornell University found that customers who belong to a hotel’s program contribute 50% more revenue to a hotel chain than those who don’t.
Faced with the challenge of disruptive third-party peer-to-peer rental sites, such as Airbnb, the hotel industry is fighting back by upping its game with new technology, apps, mobile capabilities and convenience. Some are also finding value in uniting properties under a single brand umbrella to increase cross-selling opportunities and leverage brand recognition. For example, InterContinental Hotels Group—operator of brands including Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn and Staybridge Suites—found that IHG Rewards Club members who stay at two sister brands will average more than three times more room nights in the future.
Hotel loyalty programs have been around since the early 1980s and were developed by large hotel chains to ensure guest retention and to encourage active purchases. However, in recent years, some experts in the tourism and hospitality industry have started to question the value of loyalty programs for hotels. Critics of loyalty programs point to the fact that it costs hotels somewhere between 1% and 5% of room revenue to create, promote, and operate a loyalty program.
So do loyalty programs benefit hotels or are they a waste of time and money? The Centre for Hospitality Research carried a study of 50,000 hotels in North America over two years to determine if hotel loyalty programs were worth the time and money hotels spend on them.
The study found that once a guest signed up to a hotel’s loyalty program, the frequency of stays booked by a guest at that hotel rose on average by 49%. The study also found that loyalty programs accounted for a 57% rise in bedroom revenue.
The authors of the report wrote, “Hotels in the study are seeing a substantial revenue increase when their guests enroll in a properly conceived and executed program.” The authors went on to write, “Loyalty programs can and do deliver positive results in terms of revenue, stay frequency, and guests spending.”
Loyalty programs also provide hotels with a wealth of information on their guests. Hotels that operate a loyalty program have insight into who their guests are, what they like, and where they are from. All this valuable information can be used by hotels to create laser-focused marketing campaigns for various kinds of guests.
Get in touch for a demo and to find out more about how to reward and engage with your customers.
Written by our CEO and Founder, Steve Risk, on the benefits of ensuring a BAE (Best Available Experience).
Rather than being all things to all people, hospitality tech needs to be the right solution for the right people.
Why? Well, it’s time to address the balance. Offering choice is an incredible thing, but it neglects the principals of our business; to provide a memorable experience is the most important thing that we do. Forgetting that, is a sure road to disaster. The old adage of “less is more” is far from a cliche in this example. Less most certainly is more when it comes to tailoring a guest’s experience.
Technology is incredible, there is no doubt about that. It’s fascinating. Among all the innovation, though, there is inherently a mass of distraction, moving us further and further from our original purpose.
What we believe at Inspire Loyalty is that we should use the technology we have to assist hospitality, not to replace it.
How can we use guest data to enhance customer engagement? It’s time to interact with customers and get personal, online and offline, learn what makes them tick and tailor experiences within the hotel to their desires. It’s time to actually show your face, not FaceTime.
Amazon has undoubtedly conquered the world of fast shopping experiences. All it takes is two clicks, and you’re done. They even have buttons on your washing machine, shipping by drone and video on demand. The difference between us and Amazon is that we are delivering an experience, not a commodity. We aren’t selling a pair of jeans, washing powder or books.
The first step in providing a truly unique and memorable experience for guests is to look into your data records, identify experiential preferences, and anticipate and deliver that need. Welcome your guests, deliver incredible food, wow the masses with your hospitality.
Yes, to do all this you need systems in place, but it’s likely that you have a lot of them in place already. Do more with less.
So many times I stay in hotels who have no record on my profile of my dislike to being allocated a room under ground level. I need to ask every time. It’s 2019, and they still don’t welcome me by name!
These issues were apparent back in the year 2000 when I worked at Gleneagles. Profile duplication was evident. Technology has advanced so far in that time, but in many cases, there has been no eradication of the lack of personalisation on customer profiles like mine.
Oranges have segments. None of the segments are exactly the same, but they are grouped into each piece of the orange.
This, unsurprisingly, is called segmentation. In our broad world of hospitality, there are two main segments: corporate and leisure. Think about that—only two types of guests amongst millions!
BAR (Best Available Rate) and deliver BAR (Best Available Experience) are a starting point, but we need to do more.
Check out what some of the customers at Whitehouse Hotel had to say about their stay:
“We have stayed in this hotel many times in the past five years since our son first came to live in Worcester for uni. Looking forward to many more visits!”
The hotel now has a reward card, which we have benefited from a few times now. It is well worth signing up for, as you can earn points each stay for money off future bookings, Sunday lunch, afternoon tea, gym personal trainer sessions and more.
Get in touch for a demo and to find out more about how to reward and engage with your guests.