Starwood Hotels & Resorts
Room service.
Problem
For meeting planners and hotels alike, contracting the right number of rooms for attendees is a tricky task. Booking too many rooms results in the planner having to pay for empty rooms and a loss in revenue for the property, while booking too few could result in disgruntled conventioneers and an unsuccessful meeting. In addition, the advent and increasing popularity of broker sites such as hotels.com and expedia.com was causing attendees to book rooms outside of their contracted meeting blocks. Starwood Hotels & Resorts contacted The Netcom Group for assistance.
Solution
Based on our extensive work with multiple hotel clients and relationships with meeting professionals, The Netcom Group understands the huge revenue potential of group business. An innovative and unique program that ensured successful meetings and protected revenue was essential, and The Netcom Group had the solution - a turn-key email system (Group Performance Marketing) was developed to market directly to potential meeting attendees with cobranded email campaigns featuring both the meeting and the hotel that prompted immediate online booking directly into the contracted meeting block at a special rate.
Results
By all measures, the email program has been wildly successful. It has generated $12 million in incremental revenue for Starwood Hotels & Resorts. Meeting planners have experienced a 200 percent increase in rooms booked. And the Netcom-developed emails have enjoyed an open rate of 51 percent, 21 percent higher than the national average.
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