NEW YORK—For hoteliers, getting guests to book direct on their websites has become a critical component to profitability and long-term success. However, this has become increasingly difficult as the marketplace is now more crowded with competitive online travel agents (OTAs) that continue to gain scale.
But, at least one company is looking to provide hoteliers with the means to fight back. Voyat, based here, was launched in May 2014 by former Google executive Benjamin Habbel. The founder and CEO noted the company spent more than a year building its cloud-based guest retention platform for hospitality. He succinctly stated the company’s straightforward goal: “Our mission is basically to build the leading guest retention platform for the hospitality industry.”
Voyat is designed to increase the retention and overall conversion rates on hotel booking sites by combining social guest intelligence with proprietary personalization technology. According to the company, after implementing Voyat, clients have seen a 24% growth in booking conversion rates on their sites and significant lifts in online revenue generation.
“For individual hotels or even brands, it is a challenge to compete with these highly optimized e-commerce engines on their own sites. So, what we’re offering is a platform that allows you to get these kind of e-commerce capabilities in a plug-and-play solution,” he said, specifically citing functionality like retention behavioral targeting and website optimization.
Habbel underscored some of the advantages to a hotel from a bottom-line standpoint. “The great thing is hoteliers now say, ‘I have this 15-20% budget that I would normally spend on an OTA, and I can now spend it on either a reward, an extra amenity or free WiFi. Hotels can really start to get more creative to incentivize users to book direct,” he said.
In addition to some of the CRM (customer relationship management) functionality of the platform, Habbel touted the ability for hotels to customize their messaging.
“Our platform allows not only for managing the creation of the connection and the identification of the users, but it also allows the hotel to create these rules. They can say ‘someone who is a retained customer or a loyal customer I want to have this benefit, or someone who is a first-time visitor I want to have this benefit.’ Sometimes, it’s really just as simple as having a little bit of an educational component to it. Why would you want to book direct? Because you get free WiFi, a great cancellation policy or, potentially, a $20 food voucher or things like that, all the way to very sophisticated loyalty programs,” he said, adding some larger brands have literally hundreds of highly targeted campaigns.
Once the product is live on a client site, Voyat automatically begins building a data asset that includes every guest or visitor who steps on a property, allowing a hotel to personalize the digital guest experience in a way that feels native and personal, according to the company. The subscription-based platform, which includes two solutions, V-Connect and V-Direct, is offered to hoteliers for $500 a month.
The platform is already live with more than 400 hotels across as many as 10 countries. Some of the clients include Movenpick Hotels & Resorts; Highgate Hotels; The Knickerbocker; New York Palace; Gresham Hotels; and Shangri-La. Voyat already represents one of the top 10 booking channels for those properties that have signed up, according to the company.
Habbel emphasized on the critical points of differentiation for Voyat. “The key thing is that we’re not directly marketing to guests. We’re empowering the hotel website, which we consider the core e-commerce channel, to get more efficient based on that data that we have,” he said.
—Dennis Nessler