Creating Suite Dreams for Travelers

Hello and welcome to the Marketing Insiders, a podcast for marketers focused on finding and targeting their ideal customers at scale. I'm your host, Moni Gruey's. We're being very timely for today's episode. It is the middle of summer, which means it's the height of travel season. In fact, I myself am going on vacation in a few days. And even after summer ends, most people are gearing up for holiday travel to take them away from their homes in just a couple of months. The travel and hospitality industry has had a rough go of it in the past few years, but it's bouncing back and it is extremely competitive. I found a few stats that said the hotel market revenue in the US is worth more than an estimated 110 billion dollars, and there are more than 90,000 hotels in the US. That means to stand out, you really need to know your audience. To help us do just that, I've invited Diane Turner, VP of Sales at Claretoss to join me today. She works with marketers in this industry on a daily basis, so she can help us share a good market plan and some of the strategies that she's seen work. Later on, Josh Belkin, VP of Loyalty and Customer Engagement at Omni Hotels and Resorts will join us. He's going to talk specifically about what Omni is doing to gain market share. But first, let's speak to Diane. Diane, welcome to the marketing insider. Thank you, Monique. How are you? I'm great. How are you doing? I am doing really well. I'm excited about the conversation we're going to have. Yeah. So you and I probably talk on a weekly basis at Claretoss yet. I've not had the chance to have you on the podcast, so I'm really excited for you to share some of your expertise with our listeners. Let's start with you giving us a quick introduction of yourself in your role here. I've been in a role of helping marketers solve problems that data can really assist with. And so the collaboration is really important to understand their needs and their goals. And come in and conversationally start to find areas where we have expertise that can help solve their problems. And most of it's around growth or recognition, which Claretoss does exceptionally well. Yeah, definitely. So let's go ahead and hop right into these questions. What are some of the major shifts in the travel industry that marketers might need to make some adjustments for? Right. As you reference, the pandemic really impacted travel, but they have rebounded in an amazing way with capacities full again and travelers re-engaging both for business and pleasure. But some of the things that we're seeing is people are wanting more personalized experiences. And in today's time with all the insights and data points we have, there's no reason that especially in the travel industry that it can't become a very personalized experience. And with AI coming in, technology is playing a role more and more in travel. The CMOs are no longer just looking at pretty pictures. They're very much focused on results and performance in their marketing. So those would be some of the biggest ones, but mobile apps are a big deal now. You can actually use your phone as a key if you check it with app ahead of your stay, which is really interesting. And also with that, if you do not want to talk to a human, you can check in without having any human contact. So it's an interesting time right now where people want a higher level of personalization, but they really want it on their terms. Yeah. That's funny that you say that. It's like the more personalized you want, the less interaction you want at the same time. That's right. I didn't ask you one a little bit, but you know, it's right. All right. So just knowing that the landscape has changed so much in a relatively short amount of time, how does Claritas help marketers in the travel industry overcome some of the challenges? Or I guess shifts, I should say. And are there any struggles in this that you're seeing? You know, what's really interesting is that you would think that a lot of these companies that are exceptional at either being a hospitality or a hotel or an airline or such, that they would really, because especially in travel, they have so much rich consumer data that they would know their customers better than they do. And that's actually where we come in and we have so many different data attributes that we can bring to light so that they can know more about their members. And we're finding that even these very, very good companies that what they do is a core business needs some help. And so knowing the presence of children, knowing the interest level, be it skiing or beaches and those kinds of things can make these companies be more relevant as they reach out to their either prospects or their guests or members or other ways that you want to address what their consumer is in this space. Right. Of course, every company has nuances that require more customized approach. So what works for one can't necessarily be a total rinse and repeat for another, but I think the idea still carries through that audience insights are necessary. And just because you have some data doesn't mean that there's not other data that wouldn't be helpful to what you're doing. To your point, we're talking to a number of companies that have tried to do segmentation on their own. Yeah. It's not actionable, or the rest of the company doesn't buy into it. So why not go to a company such as Claritas has been doing it for 52 years and measures and has results of having these better insights that can be actioned upon. Right. The industry is a really fun time to be in this space right now and especially with the offerings that we now have incorporating AI into the mix. Yeah. So you kind of touched on my next question. It's one thing to know who you're trying to reach, know who your patrons are, your customers are. But what sort of or which success metrics are you noticing to be the most important for the travel and hospitality industry? So if it's for paid media, we established a criteria up front. Maybe it's an app download that you want to quantify a lift and we always have a control group so that you know what that lift is versus random creative that would be out into paid media. We also are very successful at email acquisition and that's generally on a CPA basis. So we either want to lower the the cost per acquisition for them or look to what they're trying to accomplish. So again, we align up front on what is important, you know, it could be bookings for the travel industry. It could be website visits. There are different criteria, but we like to understand that so that we know that we're optimizing towards that within the either campaign or work we're doing with our clients. Yeah. That makes sense. All right, so we're kind of flying through these questions, but I have one more question for you since I still have Josh to interview and I want to make sure our episode doesn't run too long, but I heard you mentioned AI several times. How do you think AI will impact the travel industry? And what can marketers do to prepare now while we're still in that early adoption period? No, that's a great question and I was at a conference recently and one of the people that was in the hospitality industry that was attending in our conversations said, finally, what we've been saying, right message, right time, you know, right channel is a reality and travel is the ultimate personalized experience that should be leveraging this. And so we're having conversations with some and you're going to talk to Josh in a little bit and mapping out where we think this would really fit in. So our solution is really a next gen dynamic generation. We have coined the phrase AI personalization and it's soon going to be for email too, but it really is. It's got a platform that we don't require a text chat change, we don't, we are not an ad server. We are so much easier than previous versions of getting that right message, right content, right channel together. And we can optimize it and actually tie it to our prism segments and one of the features that I really like is being able to top to those segments, ask some questions and a virtual focus group. And so really the capabilities, we don't believe humans will ever be replaced, but in our platform, AI is doing things that would take incredible amounts of time and doing it in real time to match the creative, the optimization, the channel and all of that correctly. So we see AI is in this application is easy to understand and the metrics are incredible. The average lift is 103% across industries, but we've seen higher percentages much higher than the 103 as an average. So it's an exciting time to marry together technology, AI, customers needs and all of that into a platform that when we show it to people, their eyes just get wider and they become interested in talking further. Yeah, I mean, it's a very interesting concept and we do recognize that since this is still the early phases that some of those high metrics might level out over time, but I wouldn't you want to take advantage of the crazy success now while you are still seeing those sort of numbers, since it is still new, there are a lot of questions out there. And I think this podcast in particular, some of the fireside chats we've done, Rex Briggs are chief AI officer. He's got a webinar series that he hosts on almost a monthly basis just to help educate the industry in many ways. things a little bit more concrete and now that we've got a few case studies out there sharing those results, I think the sky's the limit for what AI is going to be able to do to help enhance what marketers are doing, not replace what they're doing. Right, agree with you 1 million percent Monique, that's a really great way of putting it. Awesome, so I think there was a pretty good way to wrap up our segment Diane, so thank you again for joining me on the marketing insider. Thank you. So stay tuned everybody because when we return we'll be joined by Josh Belkin from Omni Hotels and Resorts. We're back and we're now joined by Josh Belkin, vice president of loyalty and customer engagement at Omni Hotels and Resorts. Josh, thank you for joining me and welcome to the marketing insider. Thank you, glad to be here. Something I'd like first time guests on our podcast to do is to introduce themselves for our listeners. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what your role at Omni entails? Absolutely, so I've been at Omni for just over a year, but I've long been in travel. I spent 10 years in various marketing leadership roles in online travel before I joined Omni, including brand marketing, customer insights, loyalty, co-brand credit cards, sponsorships, e-commerce, so really seen marketing and travel marketing from so many different angles. And I've long had a passion for travel. I like data and math so much as a kid, I love to travel and really became fascinated by consumer psychology, so you put all that together and what I get to do now at Omni is a great combination of those things. So I get to look after our loyalty program, which is called Select Guest, customer intelligence we've been working with Clara Tosta to build out some muscle on and really how we interact and engage with our customers in between their stays, as well as during their stay is a big part of what my team looks after and we're really proud of that work. This is the first time that you and I are really getting a chance to connect, but I have talked to both Diane and Ron Cohen about Omni and Clara Tosta's relationships, and you guys do work super closely together. I'm glad to be getting the chance to dig in more about the approach that you guys make over at Omni with your strategic decisions and what you're tasked with every day. So if I'm not mistaken, I think you just said you're fairly new to the Omni team, but not the travel and hospitality industry itself. So what made you decide as someone new to the company to bring in a third party to help with audience insights and eventually campaign execution? Well, first let me perhaps if your audience isn't totally familiar with Omni, share a little bit of context on who the brand, who the business is. Omni is privately and family-owned based out of Dallas, Texas. We own and operate 50 full-service resorts and hotels in North America, and what's called really upper upscale segment of the lodging market. So we want to play just below those pure luxury hotel brands. We want to be more approachable luxury. How do we do it? It's really about creating elevated places and spaces that are really inspired by that destination you're in. You feel like a real sense of place when you're in our hotels and we want to have our guests surrounded by really authentic experiences and and really nice warm personal service. Another thing it makes Omni unique is how we deliver on that. We are vertically integrated. We're an owner, brand, and operator. So we're not a franchise model like many of the other hotel companies. So it's our people in the hotels running them, delivering that experience and it really allows culture to be a differentiator for us. But that also means by operating these hotels in full, we're also in the dining business, we're in the golf business, we're in the spa business, and so many other things other than just the business of selling a bedroom. So that provides an interesting opportunity of how we go to market and how we connect with our guests and understand what their needs and wants are. Omni and Claire Toss, we initially began working together through a segmentation project and from that you were able to develop a little bit better understanding of your guests. I mean, you guys have a great model. So just having some enhanced insights is always good to make it even better. Can you tell us a little bit more about the, I guess, quote, unquote, typical Omni guest or who the Omni guests are? We have very rich zero party and first party data on our past guests, of course. Who stayed, where they stayed, what event they might have traveled for, their contact info, did they play golf, did they eat in the restaurant, how they scored us in their post day survey, but we're limited really to those direct interactions and observations. Right. So we were keen to marry our data with third party data to get a rich review of who our customers been historically, how that's evolved over time, and probably most importantly, where it's going next. So I want to understand who our customer is outside of our hotels, even our best and most frequent customers probably spend more time at home than in our hotels, living their lives outside of our hotels. And we learned that we serve a wide range of customers, but two key personas emerged. Working with Clare Toss and the identity graph, we were able to run campaigns to acquire local likes similar to our best customers, but not yet in our database. And it tells us really also where to be able to focus our efforts. And we're not to focus our efforts and resources. And we learned that a large number of our guests reside or are concentrated in a relative handful of prism segments. And those, those personas really, there were two, some commonalities for sure, but one big persona was families. And these are families that have middle or high school age kids typically in the house, they live in the suburbs of big cities, they're well educated, they're pressed for time, they're living busy lives, dual income households running between kids activities, busy careers, but they value convenience, they're willing to pay for that convenience. We saw that in the fact they have high usage of things like meal delivery kits, they die now in a lot. And these families also really enjoy watching and participating in sports, they highly value the ability to travel, get away as a family and do a lot of sports and activities on those travels. Okay. And then the other big persona, you know, we identified as really this empty nester, these are older retired kids are out of the house, but they are particularly very active. They want to enjoy the finer things in life. And as many of them are retired, they have time and accumulated wealth to enjoy that lifestyle. Their stays are longer than families in our hotels on average because they have that time. They're not tied to a school calendar, for example. And we learned it's a very well-traveled group and they're active in their community. And when they're traveling, they enjoy those activifications, including golf, tennis, which lines up very well with our portfolio of properties. And another interesting call out, I'd say, is about half of our business in Omni comes from group meetings and events. So these are people coming to our hotels because they have a convention or an association meeting happening there. And when we learned as the demographics and psychographics of our group guests are actually very similar to our leisure guests. And that's, I would say good news for us in many ways because it means we can really focus our marketing efforts on the same customer just different use cases. And what's great is group attendees will get introduced to our brands through their meetings or events. But they have a great experience and then they return with their family for leisure or maybe they bring their family or partner with during their meetings and they get to hang out by the pool or enjoy the spa while they're perhaps at a meeting. And it's nice to have that synergy in our business. Yeah, that's so interesting. So it sounds like Omni guests have some unifying characteristics that make them similar, which it makes sense. But then there are enough differences in your core consumer groups that warrant much more targeted marketing messages offers that sort of thing instead of just going with a more general audience or mass marketing approach, which you might see from others in the industry. So how do you determine what the right messaging and channels for repeat guests or the properties that you're promoting to prospective audiences are you using those insights to inform your go-to-market strategy? Yeah, I'd say like most brands are probably all brands. We're on that constant optimization quest to drive more effective and relevant marketing. You know, that old marketing adage, right person, right message, right time. I think we've been able to learn from that and we're still learning from that on how we can optimize. You know, for example, on timing, this summer, we're leaning very heavily into family travel with a new ad campaign and offers such as kids eat free. When the fall hits, kids are back to school, we can lean more into that empty nestered travel as they're not tied to a school break schedule. And that allows us to change the messaging, the offers, the creative. So featuring creative with kids and families for one segment and and featuring active retirees, for example, for the other segment and being able to really understand who's on the other side of the screen or who's on the other side of the message. And be able to tailor the message, the creative and the offers accordingly. Yeah, and as a consumer, if you're seeing yourself represented on the screen, you're much more likely to pay attention. So that would make you want to be an omnigast, want to go to the omniproperties. I would be remiss if I didn't ask you a question that was specific to loyalty program since that is part of your title. So you revamped your guest loyalty program. But what made you decide to do that? And how was the program structured before versus now? Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yes, we made a large change or a select guest loyalty program at the beginning of this year. And the headline I would say is that we moved from a frequency-based model to a spend-based model of how we recognize and reward our guests. We wanted to make the program more generous and more attainable for our guests and really reward them for their whole life. stay. As I mentioned, you know, we're in the dining business, the spa business, the golf business, and our old program was silent to all those things you did around our hotels and resorts. It was really about how many nights did you stay in a bed, and we wanted to broaden the program to recognize and reward based on all that activity. And what we've seen is great engagement from guests on that great feedback. We didn't take anything away. It was purely additive, and we've allowed it for customers to be able to move up our status levels much faster, unlock new benefits, new experiences, and it's obviously a great benefit to the guests, but it provides a great signal for our operations at the hotel as well when we create essentially more differentiation on the tiers, and we're able to understand which are our top and most valuable guests directly on property. We have a very high touch experiential set of benefits in our program that's part of what's unique about Omni being the size it is and the nature of the property. So we have loyalty ambassadors who are on property, doing very high touch interactions with our guests, and being able to share claritas insights with them on who our guest is allows them to better tailor and cater their communications and their reach outs, and what types of amenities and food and beverage and features they'd like to see on property. So that's been a nice way to tie it all together. That's awesome. All right, Jess, so I'm looking at the clock and we're running up against time today already. This has gone so quickly, but I do have one final question for you before I let you go. So we're focused on the travel and hospitality industry for this episode, but our podcast listeners come from all sorts of backgrounds, all sorts of industries. So I do try to weave in at least a few questions that don't necessarily only matter to the industry that's being highlighted. And one of those is related to internal silos. So they can be a big issue for all companies of all sizes, and I know that Omni just appointed a new chief marketing officer back in May, I think it was. So how will your team work with him to execute the vision for marketing campaigns and programs, especially since that does bring a new dynamic to how you were operating before. Yeah, I'd say we're fortunate to all be in the same building as our ownership, our leadership. It's a really close knit working community. And the ClarenTos work in particular has been a great unifier, I'd say. It's given us a common language across the business and certainly our marketing department, but the broader business on who our customer is, how we talk about them. And it's given a common lens for decision-making within the company as well. So for example, we had a prospective sports partner approach us, and we were able to look at our ClarenTos customer segments and recognize that sport they represented was not a good fit for who our customer is. And we were able to have a data-driven approach to recognize that and say, actually instead these other sports would be better fits. And being able to have that lens of how we make decisions and prioritize this organization, I think, is very valuable. Yeah, I would agree, especially with, when general budgets are tightening up across the board and you want to make sure that you're being more efficient with your spin. So that's awesome that you have the insights to be able to tell you that sounds great, but when we dig into the data a little bit deeper, it's not necessarily the way that we want to go. So I'm glad to hear that ClarenTos is helping you to do that. But Josh, you've been a pleasure to have this my guest and I hope we get a chance to do this again in the future. So thank you for joining me today on the podcast. Thank you. Enjoy the conversation. I said before I had one last question for you, but actually my last question would be where can our listeners go if they want to connect with you or learn more about all the cool new programs and property features and benefits that Omni has to offer them? Absolutely. You can learn much more about Omni at Omnihotels.com and the SelectS loyalty program and all of our great properties and resorts and you can find me on LinkedIn. Perfect. We'll put those in the show notes. So listeners, if you want to check those out, please do so. I also want to give another shout out to my first guest, ClarenTos's own Diane Turner. And as always, thank you to those of you that are listening at home or on the go. If you've not already, please take a moment to follow the marketing insider so you never miss an episode. Read us five stars on your podcast app of choice, our favorite being Spotify and share us with a friend or colleague so we can keep the conversation going. And with that, we'll see you next time with a brand new episode. Bye now. [Music]