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Holiday Inn Club Vacations® is a growing network of seven branded vacation resorts, with an additional location in Las Vegas set to join the brand in 2012. Holiday Inn Club Vacations began using Revinate at their flagship property, Orange Lake Resort, the largest resort in the network with 2,478 villas. In 2012, the brand plans to expand its use of Revinate to all seven resorts.
Long-time believers in online reputation management, Holiday Inn Club Vacations was an early adopter of Radian6 to monitor brand mentions and Hootsuite to engage across social media. However, given the growing importance of online hotel reviews and the very specialized requirements of reputation management for hotels, Holiday Inn Club Vacations sought out a comprehensive monitoring and engagement platform that is exclusively focused on hospitality. Revinate was selected, in no small part because ease-of-use is critically important to wide team adoption. The team was pleased to find that Revinate was much more than an online review site “listening platform”. Brooke Doucha, Senior Manager, Corporate Communcations, says, “Not only does Revinate aggregate user-submitted reviews from all the top review sites, it has greatly enhanced our ability to report on our property’s performance.”
According to Keith Strickland, Social Media Specialist at Holiday Inn Club Vacations at Orange Lake Resort, “Revinate seamlessly integrates and organizes all reviews for our property into a secure, easily-accessible and cloud-based dashboard that can be utilized by an unlimited number of users, including not only myself but the Manager of Rental Marketing, Front Desk Director and others. Revinate also allows us to hone in on our performance trends as compared to our competition, and its new “sentiment analysis” provides key trends and topics so that we can better understand our social audience.”
In late 2011, when Revinate rolled out foursquare integration, Holiday Inn Club Vacations was eager to take advantage of the new functionality. Keith says, “Integration with foursquare, the leader in location-based services, is really interesting to us. By monitoring social media activity in real-time while people are onsite, we can personally recognize our guests, offer deals to drive ancillary revenue and provide enhanced levels of customer service.”
Enhancing levels of customer service is one of the cornerstones of the brand’s social media engagement program. When it comes to service, Keith notes, “We’ve pleasantly surprised many guests who check-in via foursquare. Little do they know we’re monitoring foursquare check-ins and all mentions of our brand name. We can quickly reply to the guest, usually via Twitter, with a note along the lines of “Welcome to Holiday Inn Club Vacations. We see you’re having a great time at [insert venue]. Be sure to try [insert recommendation] and let us know if there’s anything you need.” The delight experienced by our guests often leads them to recommend us to their social networks of family and friends. One guest even commented, “OMG!! The resort I’m staying at just mentioned me.”
The resort is currently working with its Food and Beverage department to serve up special offers. The marketing and communications team is actively engaging with customers to better understand what specials foursquare users will gravitate towards, and how to best structure specials to ensure business success. While foursquare provides insightful venue statistics, including average check-ins per day, unique visitors, social reach as well as age and gender demographics, Orange Lake Resort is most excited about the quality metrics that Revinate provides, including the tips that customers leave when they’re on site.
Although the resort originally signed up with Revinate to simply understand what guests were saying about the property in online reviews, Brooke says that staff is now using Revinate far more actively and for far more than ever anticipated. She says, “In addition to saving us an incredible amount of time monitoring and analyzing our review data, Revinate has significantly impacted our reporting capabilities, allowing us to easily operationalize social media and report on our success. We’ve been so impressed with Revinate’s rapid innovation that I can’t wait to see what 2012 will bring.”
About Revinate
Revinate helps hotels compete with a user-friendly software solution for managing and tracking reviews and media mentions on OTAs and social networks. Developed exclusively for the hospitality industry, Revinate allows hotels to turn online guest feedback into actionable plans to quickly respond to competition and market demands, increase customer satisfaction and drive revenue. Revinate is based in San Francisco and has clients worldwide. To learn more, visit www.revinate.com.
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