During the crisis, a lot of hoteliers were forced to rethink the business strategy and about how to bounce back and capitalize on this difficult period. One great example is provided by a pioneer in the hospitality industry. Nestor achieved very encouraging results with some powerful marketing tactics.
As an innovative player, Nestor carefully selected open & flexible platforms, using apaleo’s cloud platform and Hotelappz as a CRM-Marketing tool. Both provide the speed & execution that is crucial in a fast changing context.
Lily Henbrey, is originally an account manager for Nestor and was able to speed up Nestor recovery by using simple yet effective Marketing strategies. How was an account manager able to speed up Nestor’s recovery?
I/ Recovery rule 1: A personalized booking confirmation
Lily Henbrey’s favourite automation is the customization possibilities within the booking confirmation email. This is the first step to building a special relationship with your guests based on trust. Guests are conditioned to look for the booking confirmation to make sure that their booking went through without getting scammed. As an experience provider, Nestor has an impactful booking confirmation to automatically send out to their guests with all the necessary information at their fingertips.
OTAs tend to hide a guest’s real emails which makes it very difficult to use them because this e-mail address is only temporary. Nestor saw this weakness and used the booking confirmation to get the guest’s real email address and to convince them to opt-in. This allows them to communicate directly with the guest and build a strong relationship.
By using a powerful booking confirmation and exploiting OTA information correctly, Lily Henbrey was able to harvest a lot of guest contacts and begin building strong relationships. She was also able to use this data to launch campaigns and increase direct bookings and ultimately affect loyalty.
Lily was able to access the full features of HotelAppz directly from within Apaleo’s property management system, which is a unique feature of the partnership between the two providers. She used HotelAppz to automate, segment, and measure message performance to have a fully personalized booking confirmation, adapted to each channel: OTAs, Directbooking, Agencies.
II/ Recovery rule 2: Automate the guest journey
Nestor didn’t stop here. To make their guests’ experiences stronger and smoother, they set up powerful pre-stay emails. These are sent to the customer between the moment that a customer makes the reservation and before check-in. The aim is to build a relationship of trust by answering recurring questions that often create doubts and fears in the customer: COVID-19 restrictions, activities to do around the property, how to check-in, and the services offered.
Nestor’s goal is to offer every possible service to their guests, they even set up an easy check-in system to help their guests feel welcome quicker. By improving her guest journey with effective emails, she drastically improved direct bookings at Nestor.
Personalization is key when automating the guest journey and to be easy it is really important to have powerful data tools. The integration between apaleo and Hotelappz is direct & standardized, which allows full freedom for a huge marketing impact. According to Lily: direct bookings went from 8,7% of total revenue to 56% of total revenue in June 2021 at Carlyle, a group of apartments.
III/ Going forward:
Lily Henbrey is a part of the new generation of Hoteliers, more than happy to try new technologies and optimistic about the future. By combining the use of apaleo’s platform with the next gen hotel CMR like HotelAppz, Nestor sped up its recovery. The integrations are standardized and allow for easy access to data for fast marketing execution. Within a couple of months, she was able to improve her guest history with powerful automations that contribute to improving Nestor’s growth.
