The Revinate Blog

Revinate Receives $14.5 Million Series A Financing

Today, Revinate, the leading provider of cloud-based enterprise software for the hospitality industry has raised $14.5 million in Series A financing from leading venture capital firms Benchmark Capital and Formation 8. The funding will be used to accelerate Revinate’s international expansion and for product development. Revinate, which recently celebrated its third anniversary, has well over 10,000 hotel and restaurant customers worldwide using its software platform to manage online reputation and connect with guests in today’s rapidly changing social media landscape. Revinate’s customers include the world’s top brands, management companies and ownership groups, such as Wyndham Hotel Group, Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group, Hyatt, White Lodging Services Corp. and Kimpton Hotels and Restaurants.

Jay Ashton, Revinate’s co-founder and CEO says, “We’re extremely excited to have Benchmark’s Peter Fenton and Formation 8’s Joe Lonsdale joining our board to help accelerate our growth to become the worldwide industry leader. Peter has an incredible track record guiding the success of great companies such as Twitter and Yelp, amongst many others. Joe, as co-founder of Palantir and Addepar, brings highly relevant technology vision and operating experience in big data analytics. In addition, Rich Barton, active Benchmark venture partner, founder of Expedia, and chairman of Zillow and glassdoor will also invest, advise Revinate and help drive strategy and growth. We’re fortunate to have assembled the ultimate team to help Revinate capitalize on our significant opportunity to help global hospitality companies thrive in today’s rapidly changing market.”

Peter Fenton, General Partner of Benchmark, says, “Jay Ashton and Marc Heyneker are terrific entrepreneurs seizing the opportunity of cloud and social to bring unique insights to the hospitality industry, which thrives on customer engagement and word of mouth. My partners and I have witnessed first-hand - through our involvement with Twitter, Instagram, Yelp and Facebook - the power of social channels to directly connect brands and consumers. I look forward to building upon Revinate's success as they continue to expand and scale."

Joe Lonsdale, General Partner of newly formed Formation 8, says, “We’re thrilled with Revinate’s success to date and the world-class team and culture they have built. We see huge potential for additional products and services that deliver even more value to customers, and, with our firm’s strong ties in Asia, we’re in a great position to help Revinate with global expansion.”

News of the funding comes of the heels of other major milestones at Revinate. In February, Wyndham Hotel Group, the world’s largest hospitality company, selected Revinate for all of its properties and corporate staff worldwide. Revinate has also opened its first office outside the United States, in Hong Kong, and will soon move to new corporate headquarters in the Letterman Digital Arts complex in the Presidio of San Francisco.

About Revinate:

With user generated content and reviews increasing in both number and importance, hotel and restaurant owners and operators have a simple choice: either ignore the cacophony of social media and hope for the best or proactively track and manage what is being said online in a way that deepens customer relationships, strengthens brands and boosts revenue. If you opt for the latter, then Revinate’s user-friendly software platform, custom-designed for the unique needs of the hospitality industry, is an irreplaceable tool. Revinate’s powerful technology monitors all of the important social media venues – including Twitter, Facebook and TripAdvisor – and provides instant alerts whenever your property or brand is mentioned. With information comes power: in this case, the power to please a disgruntled customer, monitor the competition and set yourself apart when it comes to guest satisfaction and loyalty. Based in San Francisco, Revinate counts the world’s leading hospitality brands as clients. To learn more, please visit http://www.revinate.com.

Revinate and Clarabridge Partner to Bring World-Class Customer Feedback Analysis to Hospitality Industry

Today, Revinate announced a partnership with Clarabridge, Inc, the global leader in text and sentiment analytics driving Customer Experience Management (CEM). Together, Clarabridge and Revinate offer an integrated solution to provide hospitality professionals with customer insight from social media activity, critical to marketing, operations and resource allocation.

Online customer reviews and social media feedback, categorized as unstructured data, traditionally come from disparate sources and are difficult to comprehensively aggregate and analyze. Revinate’s sentiment analysis solution, powered by Clarabridge, arms the hospitality industry with an intuitive, enterprise-grade solution that automatically monitors and analyzes unstructured content. Delivered in real time, critical voice of the customer data bolsters service recovery, training, and operational improvements.

“The growing importance of online reviews in consumer purchase decisions makes it more critical than ever for hotels and restaurants to pay close attention to issues raised by guests,” said Jay Ashton, Co-Founder and CEO of Revinate. “The hospitality industry has always been dedicated to providing a great guest experience; learning from, and acting upon, guest feedback is crucial to boosting sales and loyalty. With Clarabridge, Revinate can easily sift through the social media chatter and transform sentiment into actionable strategies.  This partnership strengthens Revinate’s ability to help hospitality companies to monitor, manage and improve their businesses through intelligent analysis of customer data.”

While Clarabridge has been working with many of the world’s largest hospitality brands for years, the partnership with Revinate means that even more regional, property and brand-level teams will have access to Clarabridge’s powerful sentiment technology. David C. Kloeppel, President and Chief Operating Officer at Gaylord Entertainment, says, “It’s exciting to see the partnership between Clarabridge and Revinate. As a long-standing customer of both companies, we recognize the power that the combined solution will give our STAR employees and we believe that loyalty will increase as we better understand our guests’ needs and provide a more tailored experience.”

“Revinate has proven itself to be the leader in hospitality reputation management, through listening and proactively engaging the Voice of Customer (VoC) as a critical initiative,” said Sid Banerjee, CEO of Clarabridge. “Members working on the front lines have exclusive access to customers on a daily basis and prove an invaluable resource to improve operations. We look forward to the synergies this partnership will provide for our hospitality customers and all organizations seeking to improve their reputational and operational posture.”

About Revinate

With user generated content and reviews increasing in both number and importance, hotel and restaurant owners and operators have a simple choice: either ignore the cacophony of social media and hope for the best or proactively track and manage what is being said online in a way that deepens customer relationships, strengthens brands and boosts revenue. If you opt for the latter, then Revinate’s user-friendly software platform, custom-designed for the unique needs of the hospitality industry, is an irreplaceable tool. Revinate’s powerful technology monitors all of the important social media venues – including Twitter, Facebook and TripAdvisor – and provides instant alerts whenever your property or brand is mentioned. With information comes power: in this case, the power to please a disgruntled customer, monitor the competition and set yourself apart when it comes to guest satisfaction and loyalty. Based in San Francisco, Revinate counts the world’s leading hospitality brands as clients. To learn more, please visit www.revinate.com

About Clarabridge

Clarabridge is the leading provider of sentiment and text analytics software for customer experience management. Clarabridge enables Global 1000 enterprises to achieve a universal understanding of their customers by automatically collecting, classifying, scoring sentiment and analyzing qualitative data found in voice of the customer feedback channels. Insights extracted result in improved marketing, product/service offerings, operations and customer service across an organization. Clarabridge customers include AOL, B/E Aerospace, Betfair, Charming Shoppes, Inc., Choice Hotels, Dell, E.ON, Expedia, Fidelity Gaylord Hotels, Intuit, J.D. Power, L’Oréal, Marriott International, Nissan, PetSmart, QVC, Inc., Sage North America, Santander, United Airlines, Unilever, Walmart, Walgreens and Wendy’s International. Clarabridge is privately held with offices in Reston, Va. and London, U.K. For more information, visit www.clarabridge.com or on Twitter: @clarabridge.

 

HotelNewsNow Recommends Revinate

Today, David Backes published a great article for hoteliers titled, 3 social-media timesavers for busy hoteliers. In the article he smartly recommends Revinate as a great solution for leveraging technology to stay on top of your hotel's online reviews and social media mentions. He says:

For brands that don’t mind using a paid tool, Revinate is excellent for cutting the time it takes to stay on top of Twitter, Facebook, TripAdvisor and pretty much anywhere else people are posting about you online. From one dashboard, you can post to Twitter, respond to reviews on TripAdvisor and monitor review trends.

Read the whole article here.

Kempinski Hotels Selects Revinate as Social Media Solution

San Francisco, CA – February 14, 2012—Revinate, the new standard for guest satisfaction for the hospitality industry, today announced that Kempinski Hotels S.A. has partnered with Revinate across its portfolio of 71 luxury hotels in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Europe.  The global rollout of Revinate is happening in-line with Kempinski’s new social media strategy to ensure that success can be tracked and measured.

Kempinski property and corporate staff will be using the software platform to both manage the properties’ online reviews and drive new business and loyalty with Revinate’s social media solution. In addition, General Managers and the Corporate Operations Department will be using Revinate’ GS2 Reports as part of their management reporting, ensuring that social media and online reviews will become operationalized, much like traditional guest satisfaction.

Kempinski selected Revinate after an in-depth, multi-vendor evaluation process. Revinate won the business based on its comprehensive, multi-language review coverage and its rich feature set. Alexander Noak, Corporate Manager Digital Strategy at Kempinksi Hotels S.A. explains, “I was looking for a way to differentiate ourselves from our competitors and we can do that through our reviews. Of all the tools we looked at, only Revinate provides a solution that allows us to use our online reviews to influence conversion. Revinate’s Social Buzz makes it quick and easy to select and post quotes from reviews on our own sites to ensure that our shoppers have trusted guest feedback to give them confidence in their booking decisions with us.”

Kempinski Hotels S.A. is an exciting new partnership for Revinate, who is already viewed as the gold standard in online reputation management for hospitality in North America. Marc Heyneker, Co-Founder and VP of Sales says, “With our recent addition of comprehensive global review coverage in all languages, Revinate is now actively expanding its services to address the needs of international customers. Having a large, well-established luxury brand like Kempinski select Revinate is a great testament to our solution’s strength and value overseas, and helps pave the way for our future growth across global markets.”

About Revinate:

With online guest-generated travel reviews increasing in both number and importance, hotel owners and operators have a simple choice: either ignore the explosion of social media and hope for the best or proactively track and manage what is being said online in a way that deepens customer relationships, strengthens brands and boosts revenue. If you opt for the latter, then Revinate’s user-friendly software platform, custom-designed for the unique needs of the hospitality industry, is an irreplaceable tool. Revinate’s powerful technology monitors all of the important social media venues – including Twitter, Facebook and TripAdvisor – and provides instant alerts whenever your property or brand is mentioned. With information comes power: in this case, the power to please a disgruntled customer, monitor the competition and set yourself apart when it comes to guest satisfaction and loyalty. Based in San Francisco, Revinate counts the world’s leading hospitality brands as clients. To learn more, please visit www.revinate.com.

Revinate Selected by AlwaysOn as an OnMedia Top 100 Winner

Revinate, the leading provider of social media and online reputation management solutions for the hospitality industry, today announced that it has been chosen by AlwaysOn as one of the OnMedia Top 100 winners.  Inclusion in the OnMedia 100 signifies leadership amongst its peers and game-changing approaches and technologies that are likely to disrupt existing markets and entrenched players. Revinate was specially selected by the AlwaysOn editorial team and industry experts spanning the globe based on a set of five criteria: innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value, and media buzz.

Revinate and the OnMedia Top 100 Companies will be honored at AlwaysOn’s OnMedia NYC event on February 22^st, 2012, at the Time Warner Center.

This two-day executive event features CEO presentations and high-level debates on which forces are disrupting user behavior and creating new opportunities in the marketing, branding, advertising, and public relations industries.

 “The make-up of OnMedia 100 represents forward-thinking media companies in a year charged with disruptive change.  The emergence of Web-fueled TV and the explosive growth of smartphones and tablets are challenging the media world to transform itself into a global, consumer-focused industry. Coupled with the socialization of everything, this year’s digital media and entertainment startups are boldly charging into future, ready to reinvent the establishment with new, invigoration products and services,” says Tony Perkins, founder and editor of AlwaysOn. “Web analytics are now embracing a social world, providing marketing and advertising companies with the targeted data that delivers on the promise of reaching consumers with meaningful, actionable messages.”

The OnMedia 100 winners were selected from among hundreds of other technology companies nominated by investors, bankers, journalists, and industry insiders.  The AlwaysOn editorial team conducted a rigorous three-month selection process to finalize the 2012 list.

Designed to meet the unique needs of the hospitality industry, Revinate is a software platform that tames and demystifies the all-important realm of social media by monitoring all online reviews and mentions of an individual property, restaurant or brand. Revinate gives owners and employees the chance to turn user-generated feedback into opportunities to delight guests, as well as the data they need to implement operational improvements. Unlike basic monitoring tools, which focus only on the individual-property level, Revinate provides the business intelligence and solutions that can be used by management companies and entire brands to drive measurable results.

A full list of all the OnMedia Top 100 winners can be found on the AlwaysOn website.

“I am incredibly proud that AlwaysOn has selected Revinate as an OnMedia Top 100 Winner,” says Jay Ashton, Co-Founder and CEO of Revinate.  “In the two years that we have been selling our software service into the hospitality vertical, we have seen incredible progress in the way that hotels and restaurants are adapting to social media and innovative new technology. As a result, they are able to reach customers and provide better service than was ever possible before. We look forward to helping our customers continue to drive sales and raise the bar when it comes to service and loyalty,” Ashton added.

About Revinate

With user generated content and reviews increasing in both number and importance, hotel and restaurant owners and operators have a simple choice: either ignore the cacophony of social media and hope for the best or proactively track and manage what is being said online in a way that deepens customer relationships, strengthens brands and boosts revenue. If you opt for the latter, then Revinate’s user-friendly software platform, custom-designed for the unique needs of the hospitality industry, is an irreplaceable tool. Revinate’s powerful technology monitors all of the important social media venues – including Twitter, Facebook and TripAdvisor – and provides instant alerts whenever your property or brand is mentioned. With information comes power: in this case, the power to please a disgruntled customer, monitor the competition and set yourself apart when it comes to guest satisfaction and loyalty. Based in San Francisco, Revinate counts the world’s leading hospitality brands as clients. To learn more, please visit www.revinate.com

About AlwaysOn

AlwaysOn is the leading business media brand networking the Global Silicon Valley. AlwaysOn helped ignite the social media revolution in early 2003 when it launched the AlwaysOn network. In 2004, it became the first media brand to socially network its online readers and event attendees. AlwaysOn’s preeminent executive event series includes the Silicon Valley Innovation Summit, OnMedia, OnHollywood, IMPACT Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic, Venture Summit East, OnDemand, Venture Summit Silicon Valley, OnMobile, and GoingGreen Silicon Valley. The AlwaysOn network and live event series continue to lead the industry by empowering its readers, event participants, sponsors, and advertisers like no other media brand.

HotelNewsNow Covers Revinate

On Tuesday, November 29th Michelle Wohl, Revinate's VP of Marketing, participated in an HSMAI Webinar about "The Future of Distribution" with Amy Severson from Expedia, Jan Freitag from STR, and Scott van Hartesvelt from Gcommerce Solutions. All the panelists agreed that social media and online reviews were changing travel at a rapid pace. Read the whole article at HotelNewsNow.com.

Why User Generated Content is the Great Equalizer in Hotel Marketing

Subscribers to Hotel BusinessReview/HotelExecutive.com can read  Michelle Wohl's article about how small and independent properties can now compete with large brands online thanks to user-generated content. Read the article here.

A Guide to Finding Your Hotel's Voice Online

A Revinate Best Practices document is featured on HotelMarketing.com. The article and included exercises aim to help hoteliers find their unique voice when responding to reviews online. Check out the article here.

Practical Tips for Using Social Media to Drive Loyalty

Subscribers of Hotel Business Review can read an article by Revinate's VP of Marketing, Michelle Wohl, about how hoteliers can use social media to drive loyalty. Read it here.

Social Times Covers Revinate

Head over to Social Times to read what every social media marketer should know about Revinate.