Sabre Hospitality solution helps famous D.C. hotel increase ad campaign ROI by 250%
Just blocks from the White House and historic Washington, D.C., landmarks, The Jefferson is a 95-room luxury boutique hotel featuring intricate design, 23 elegantly appointed suites, modern amenities including a petite spa, fine dining in the award-winning Plume and Quill, and exceptional personalized service.
Sabre Hospitality Solutions, a division of Sabre Corp., a travel technology company based in Southlake, Texas. Founded in 2009, Sabre Hospitality Solutions provides technology to the global hospitality industry enabling hoteliers to enhance the guest experience, identify cost savings, and increase revenue.
Re-engaging potential guests with a focus on sales efforts
To increase booking rates and revenue, The Jefferson hotel executives initiated a “Third Night Free” promotional campaign. Specifically, their effort focused on audience remarketing by targeting online users who had entered the booking engine and searched availability for at least three consecutive nights in the previous 30 days – but who hadn’t booked a room. It’s simple, basic arithmetic: a three-night stay generates three times more revenue than a one-night stay.
Their initial efforts involved using a general purchase-intent signal to determine the audience that had received display ads through Google’s retargeting capabilities. But this proved to be costly and inefficient – they weren’t getting the results they wanted. General purchase intent signals allowed them to reengage previous visitors who had demonstrated interest by looking at pricing information, but it didn’t allow them to qualify visitors’ specific needs and align them with their marketing objectives. They wanted a refined solution, one that would lower the costs associated with acquiring these bookings through the hotel’s direct channel.
A Sabre solution that cuts to the chase
Meanwhile, Sabre Hospitality Solutions Digital Experience and Retailing Insights teams had developed a solution that allows hoteliers to analyze the purchase intentions of a visitor to their online booking engine by using the arrival and departure dates the visitor had entered. With this information, hotels have the ability to target visitors who exited the booking engine without making a purchase through interest-specific communications.
These Retailing Insights booking engine pace reports help hotels identify the interest trend in real time and then load the pace report data into the hotel’s Google AdWords account. Hoteliers can evaluate the interest trends, build specific audiences, refine and develop targeted marketing collateral, and then re-engage those visitors with refined, highly targeted advertisements on their search, display, and social networks.
An app with appealing features and benefits
Similarly, Retailing Insights‘ pace reporting, purchase-intent parameters, and other booking-engine metrics can also be utilized to:
- Exclude visitors – such as those who have searched for a date with no availability – from seeing an advertisement within a specific time period
- Drive ancillary and food and beverage (F&B) sales after a visitor has already booked by re-engaging with them between the time of confirmation and arrival with ads promoting ancillary products and services
- Compare key performance indicators (KPIs) against similar properties and industry benchmarks
- Determine the success of digital marketing campaigns as well as website and booking engine conversions
- Make data-driven decisions to optimize digital marketing spend and increase market share
- Quickly understand trends, successes, and opportunities based on historical performance, customized competitive sets, and industry benchmark data
Success right off the bat
Sabre and The Jefferson had worked together for years, with Sabre managing the previous remarketing campaigns. The Jefferson agreed to test Sabre’s beta solution and enjoyed positive results almost immediately. The interest-based campaign experienced an ROI increase by more than 250% over a campaign that targeted the entire audience at 25% of the cost. Additionally, after applying the Retailing Insights remarketing parameters, the campaign’s cost per acquisition (CPA) improved from $17 to $5.
The hotel then reallocated the unused spend to another custom targeted audience, which generated similar results. Together, the two campaigns generated an increase in overall bookings while still spending less than the original campaign.
Sabre Hospitality Solutions remains the only agency that is offering this level of audience targeting for the hospitality industry. “When you think of audience targeting, interest-based re-engagement makes the most sense,” says Paul Cote, Sabre Hospitality Solutions’ Senior Director of Digital Marketing Services. “We were excited to be one of the first in the industry to develop this exciting new product. Even after testing we were pleased to see the immediate positive results we were looking for.”
Visit the Retailing Insights page or contact your account manager for more information.