The Revinate Blog

How Hotels are Using Foursquare

In April 2011, foursquare, the addictive location-based service for smart phone users, announced that there had been more than a billion check-ins on the platform. In addition, 500,000 businesses are using foursquare’s Merchant Platform to create “specials,” which are location-based mobile coupons. Many of those businesses are hotels and restaurants looking to drive awareness and increase loyalty with regular customers.

The Distrikt Hotel in New York’s garment district has always been at the forefront of social media. They actively engage with prospects and clients on Facebook, Twitter and now foursquare. Grant Schilling, Sales and Marketing Manager, believes that social media is the best vehicle for providing the little touches that create strong bonds between businesses and customers. He sees foursquare as a great platform to spread the word about the hotel and to drive demand.

The Distrikt Hotel has set up both their hotel and restaurant, Collage Bistro, as “venues” on foursquare. When users check in on foursquare using their smart phones, they have the opportunity to earn 1000 loyalty points at the hotel or receive a free drink (with a minimum spend) at the restaurant.

Even more importantly, whenever guests check in on foursquare, the hotel acknowledges them in a special way. Depending on availability, they will either receive a room upgrade, a special amenity or dessert, or a note thanking them for their loyalty.

Andaz San Diego is another socially active hotel that believes foursquare is a good place to connect with guests and prospects. Andaz’s Marketing Manager, Rachael Giannecchini has created venues for all their public spaces and has created specials geared towards their foodie fans. For example, a recent special at the hotel’s restaurant encouraged customers to check in to sample seasonal Chef’s Choice appetizers. While Rachael cautions that Facebook, given its size and content-rich platform, presents higher-volume opportunities to engage and share information, she thinks that having a presence on all social channels used by guests is important to a hotel’s success on social media.

La Concha Renaissance San Juan Resort is another hotel actively using foursquare. The hotel began participating on the platform when the social media manager, Simon Benus, noticed that no businesses in Puerto Rico were offering foursquare specials even though he and his friends were active users of the application. He says, “I saw getting the hotel officially on foursquare as an opportunity to be ahead of the competition and to generate some free word-of-mouth publicity.”

In the beginning, Simon’s goals were modest. He just wanted his properties to stand out, which was easily accomplished since businesses that offered specials on foursquare were listed with a prominent orange label. He also wanted to generate positive awareness, which was easily accomplished because foursquare notifies friends of guests when they check-in to the hotel.  And guests quickly began to notice that the hotel was active on foursquare. Guests routinely tweet when they unlock specials such as free Mojitos at the lobby bar.  

Whether you are looking to increase your visibility on social networks or surprise and delight your socially active guests, foursquare is a great platform on which to participate. The cost of entry is free and all you need is a resource to monitor and manage check-ins and engage with guests. And, best of all, Revinate customers can set up specials and monitor tips and check-ins from their Revinate dashboard, making the process seamless.

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Create & Run foursquare Specials with Revinate - How to get Started

Foursquare allows businesses to create Specials, which can be thought of as virtual coupons. This is a great way for hoteliers to attract new customers, reward your most loyal ones, start driving immediate ancillary revenue and help to stand out from your competitors. The best thing is that it’s completely free – no commitment, no credit cards, no risk! Foursquare doesn’t charge any fees for businesses to run Specials, so the only cost to you is the economic value you offer to foursquare users. 

When a foursquare user opens up the “app” on their smartphone they can see a list of venues that are nearby, as well as those that are running Specials. This is a great way to entice people to stop by your business, rather than one down the road. 

Get started with foursquare Specials on Revinate!

As part of Revinate’s foursquare integration, you can create and run Specials directly within your account.  Once you’ve linked your venues into Revinate, click on the “Start a Campaign” link on the foursquare mission control homepage, then follow these easy steps:

1. Select from the list of venues linked to your Revinate account, that you want to apply the Special to.
2. Select the type of Special. Depending on the type of Special, you may need to fill out criteria for when the Special gets unlocked.
3. Describe your Special, including the offer description and optional custom unlocked text and fine print.
4. Select a start and end date for your Special.

It’s also easy to end a Special. Just click on the Special from the “Campaigns” box on the foursquare mission control page, and you’ll see the option to end the Special (you can only retire Specials that you have created). 

Here’s just some examples of Specials you could run. Of course feel free to get creative. Chat among your colleagues to find out what Specials they would like to receive. Are there any amenities at your hotel that you want to drive people to during a given time? Check out what your competitors are doing – are they even running Specials? 

• Check-in special: When a person checks-in to your hotel they get 15% off any treatment at your spa.
• Mayor special: When the mayor checks-in, they get a free room upgrade.
• Friends special: Check-in to your bar with five or more friends and get 10% off your next stay at the hotel.
• Newbie special: First time staying at your hotel – check-in to earn a free drink at your lobby bar!

Hoteliers Guide to Location-Based Services

By partnering closely with many leading-edge hospitality companies, Revinate is in the unique position to learn first-hand about the social media strategies that work, and don’t work, for the hospitality industry. The Hoteliers Guides are our way of sharing what we have learned with the larger community.

This guide is an introduction for hoteliers who are new to location-based services. The guide will help you understand the opportunity that LBS presents, how to get started using foursquare and other services, and best practices to employ to drive success.

Download the entire Hoteliers Guide to Location-Based Services.

Location-Based Services for Hotels - Webinar Materials

Thanks to Benji Greenberg of BCV and Revinate's Linden Freeman for a great Webinar this morning about how hoteliers can use foursquare to drive loyalty and sales.

We received a lot of great questions during the event and Linden's responses are below. Scroll all the way down for a copy of the slide deck and a recording of the Webinar.

If you are offering a Special, how do you monitor the people who want to take advantage of it?

If a person has noticed your Special and wants to redeem it, they have to unlock the Special by meeting the criteria you have set for them (e.g. checking-in three times within a week). They will then need to show their phone screen to one of your employees that indicates they’ve unlocked the special. It’s important to make sure that all of your employees are aware of any Specials you’re offering on foursquare and that they know how to recognize if a Special has been unlocked. Foursquare has a flyer you can share with employees that shows what it looks like when a Special has been unlocked on a user’s phone. (And of course Revinate customers can access the flyers after creating Specials within Revinate.)

The Gowalla application just introduced a new concept of “Travel and Storytelling.” How do you think this could be utilized and could it serve as a better alternative to foursquare?

Gowalla recently launched an updated version of its application, which incorporates two new key areas: travel and storytelling. This update makes them now more of a city travel guide, downplaying the role of check-ins in favor of discovery, travel and storytelling. Checking-in is now just one aspect of the app. When you pull up Gowalla on your phone now, you’ll still see the main activity feed where you can find the activity from your friends. But now, instead of a stream of check-ins, you’ll notice people hanging out together, sharing photos, and talking to each other in smaller groups, which Gowalla calls “stories.” Gowalla is building more than 60-curated city guides that help tell people where to go and what to see. Users are also encouraged to build “stories” out of their travels, which start with their check-ins but can be enhanced by tagging other people and gathering pictures uploaded for particular stories. With this relaunch it seems that Gowalla is trying to differentiate itself from foursquare by moving away from game-based elements, and focusing on local discovery. Since foursquare has such a larger user-base, I feel that it’s still your safest bet. Foursquare also provides businesses with the ability to create and run Specials, which provides real value to customers and a way to entice people to go to your business. It’s important to do your homework though with the different location-based services out there and see if your target audience is using them. If people are actively engaged on Gowalla in your market, then it’s worth claiming your business and paying attention to what people are saying about your location.

You mentioned the importance of being authentic with responses to people who check-in on foursquare, but how do you do this without having any information on this person?

When people check-in to your venue on foursquare, they have the ability to also leave a tip, post a photo and/or share their check-in to their Twitter/Facebook accounts. If you see that someone has posted a tip or a photo, this gives you a little more information about what they think about the venue. Maybe it’s something specific to your hotel lobby – you could tweet back to them that you hope they like the lobby, and why not check-out the view of the beach outside? When people tweet their check-in, they can add a comment about what they're doing. So if the person has linked their Twitter account to their foursquare profile, you could check out the person’s Twitter account and see if they have said anything more specific about what they're doing, which would allow you to customize your response. Otherwise, I think the fact that you're tweeting back to them and welcoming them to your hotel is a great way to surprise and delight them.

How about foursquare in international markets? Is it becoming more widely adopted, or is it mainly just used within the U.S.?

Foursquare is definitely starting to gain more traction in international markets. In February 2011, foursquare announced that they launched five translations of their application - in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. Since then they’ve seen that these five new languages represent some of our fastest growing areas internationally. Just recently at the beginning of September 2011, they announced the launch of five more languages (Bahasa Indonesia, Korean, Protugese, Russian and Thai). For more information on their integration of foreign languages, checkout their blog article here.

In case you missed the webinar, you can find a copy of the slides here and a recording below. As always, we would love your feedback on the webinar and would love to know what other topics you would like to see us cover.

Revinate Integrates With foursquare

Revinate, the new standard for guest satisfaction, today announced the launch of its strategic integration with foursquare, a location-based mobile platform with more than ten million users. Integration with foursquare makes it easy for Revinate customers to monitor and reward social activity on their premises in real-time. With this update, Revinate enhances its position as the market leader and offers the most comprehensive set of reputation management functionality designed exclusively for hoteliers.

One of the first companies to integrate with foursquare’s new Merchant API, Revinate is allowing its thousands of hotel customers to create and launch foursquare specials directly from their Revinate dashboard. Customers can select from many options to create the best special for their business objectives, including a mayor special, a check-in special, a loyalty special, and many more. In addition to surprising and delighting guests by connecting with them in real-time on their preferred social networks, hoteliers can now easily identify and reward loyal visitors and even increase ancillary revenue. For example, hoteliers can offer a foursquare special at their bar, restaurant or even spa in order to entice guests who would otherwise check-out without having experienced the additional services.

Hoteliers are just beginning to explore the sales and loyalty opportunities created by Foursquare.  According to Jay Ashton, CEO and co-founder of Revinate, “Hotels are always looking for new ways to differentiate on service. By providing our customers with an intuitive on-ramp to an innovative, fast-growing location-based service, we’re opening the door for exciting opportunities for our customers to stand-out from the crowd and drive incremental revenue.”

Akshay Patil, Platform Evangelist at Foursquare says, “We built the Merchant API to allow third parties to build super useful tools to reach foursquare’s fast-growing community. With this new integration, Revinate has created a great tool for the hospitality industry.”

While foursquare is the first location-based service that Revinate has integrated into its platform, customers can expect additional services to be integrated in the near future.

Location-Based Services for Hotels - A Best Practices Webinar

'Checking In' means one thing to hoteliers. It means something very different to the millions of people who use location-based services like Foursquare, Facebook Places, Google Places and Gowalla. Join Benji Greenberg of BCV and Linden Freeman of Revinate for an hour of straight talk about what hotels should, and shouldn't be doing on these social platforms.

During the session we will:

• discuss the leading location-based services and explain how they differ
• share best practices from the hospitality industry
• provide recommendations for rewards and deals
• see how Revinate incorporates LBS into its industry-leading software solution for hoteliers

When: Tuesday, September 13th at 10am Pacific/1pm Eastern

To attend, you must sign up in advance here. We will be recording the session so even if you can't attend, please sign up and we will notify you when the recording has been posted.

See you online.

 

How to be Remarkable Using Social Media

Yesterday during my session at the PRSA conference in San Antonio, Texas, I was asked what hotels can do to increase review volume. First, I explained that hotels need to come out and ask happy guests to write reviews. The best time to do that is at checkout or in email, when the guest returns home. Then I remembered something that Daniel Craig says a lot and I told the audience that they should also "be remarkable". In other words, give your guests something to write about.

Joie de Vivre has put a program in place around being remarkable called the DreamMaker Program. According to its Web site, the program "encourages our line-level employees to go the extra mile for guests in order to transform them from simply satisfied customers into genuinely loyal guests." Read some examples of dreams that were made here.

A few days ago, one of our partners, BCV, forwarded me a link to a blog post written by a woman who had a remarkable experience at the InterContinental Hotel Times Square. A joint Revinate and BCV client, it was great to see how the hotel was using technology and old fashioned hospitality to surprise and delight its guests by monitoring Foursquare and other social networks, engaging and rewarding. And it's proof that if you are remarkable to your guests, they will tell others. Read the first-hand account of the experience here.

I followed up with Victoria Zuffranieri at the hotel to get her thoughts about how Revinate helped facilitate their incredible service levels and she said,  “Revinate is a great tool that allows a hotel to listen to the conversations that are taking place about their property as well others hotels throughout various social mediums. Understanding your customer and listening to their feedback are the keys to success and the Revinate tool helps to better deliver this valuable information to a hotel.”

Have your own story to share? Let me know in the comments below.

A Rundown of Alert Possibilities

Unlike traditional office employees such as myself, hoteliers are rarely at their desks. The good news for me is that my desk looks out at the Golden Gate Bridge and I never tire of the view. The better news is that I rarely miss a tweet or post because I always have a monitor with Revinate showing my mentions. For hoteliers, it's a bit more difficult to stay on top of mentions so I thought I would provide a rundown of applications that provide alerts that can help hoteliers.

1. Revinate. Revinate clients can opt-in to email alerts for notification of new reviews and social media mentions. The alerts also include recommended actions, such as respond to a negative review or read a competitor's new review. Clients can also be sent a weekly scorecard alert which provides data and analysis on social media progress and gains against the competition. Revinate is continuing to work on its alerts so stay tuned for new developments.

2. TripAdvisor. If you're not a Revinate client, make sure you sign up to be alerted when a new review is posted to TripAdvisor. You can do this in the Owners Center. You will want to respond to reviews within a day or two to ensure that prospects know you're listening closely to guest feedback.

3. Google Alerts. Revinate clients will likely be managing their properties and competition using the Social Media Searches feature in Revinate, but Google Alerts can also come in handy. Google Alerts are a free and easy way to monitor topics on the Web. For example, to stay on top of social media best practices in the industry, you might want to create an alert for 'Hotel Social Media'. I prefer to get my alerts once a day, but you can decide your frequency when you sign up.

4. Foursquare and Gowalla. Sorry - No dice. While it would make sense for location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla to alert you whenever someone checks-in to your hotel, that's not possible today using these services. However, if you are monitoring Twitter and public Facebook pages for your hotel name, many people that check-in have linked their Twitter and Facebook accounts so a tweet/status update is sent out at the same time. Revinate clients will see the check-in in the Social Media Searches section with a foursqaure url such as http://4sq.com/mnRtjJ

5. Local Response. A new service in Beta, Local Response will monitor Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, MyTown, Loopt, Whrrl, Brightkite and other services and alert you when your hotel is mentioned. The great news is that Local Response will fill the gap that exists today because location based services aren't sending alerts when folks check-in.

6. Twitter. Folks that use Twitter can opt-in for alerts when someone starts following you or when you receive a new direct message. For more sophisticated alerts, you need to use a Twitter client such as Local Response, ifttt, tweetbeep, or a host of other services.

If you know of other valuable alert solutions, please let everyone know in the comments below.

Helping Business Travelers Meet on the Road

Years ago, I spent the majority of my time on the road, traveling for business. I used to order-in room service and watch a movie at night because I hated dining alone. Many times I thought about creating a 'Match.com' for business travelers. With a calendaring app and a profile, you would have the tools you needed to meet other business travelers for networking dinners or activities during your free time. Ten years later, someone has stolen my idea and, thanks to advances in technology, made it totally simple and easy to use.

IMGuest allows you to link your Facebook or Twitter profile and check-in to your hotel. The service then shows you who else is at the hotel and what they are looking to do. Sites like these take time to build up a user-base and gain momentum so time will tell whether people will use the service. But I'm going to New York this weekend so I'll check it out.

Like other location based services, hotel owners can engage and reward guests and have access to stats and info about guests. Upon check out, the guests can leave private feedback for the hotel about his/her stay. For more information, click here.

Location-Based Service Getting a Lot of Buzz

Scvngr is a location-based mobile game that is starting to attract a lot of attention. Just this morning, it was featured in a NYT article. The service allows consumers to go deeper than just checking-in and sharing their location with friends. With scvngr they can accept a challenge and be rewarded for playing. For example, maybe you want to promote your lobby bar. Create a challenge for your guests to report the bartender's favorite drink to make, or daily special, and win a free appetizer, for example. Learn more here.