This sponsored material was produced in cooperation with a Skift partner.
In the face of shorter booking windows, a leisure and domestic travel revival, and a growing labor force of digital wanderers, not to point out the big investment by the big chains into their own loyalty platforms, independent hotel brand names require to rethink their approach to commitment– with higher focus on their authenticity and their capability to provide authentic regional experiences.
The pandemic overthrew the regimens of commitment travelers, creating brand-new chances for smaller brand names to steal market share from bigger chains. According to Skift Research, commitment program contributions decreased at the majority of major brand names throughout the pandemic. Now, as travel rebounds, commitment is up for grabs.
Chris Hartley, CEO of GHA” Prior to the pandemic, business travel section was the premium and most rewarding loyalty audience,”said Chris Hartley, CEO of Global Hotel Alliance (GHA), the world’s largest association of independent hotel brand names. “However we’ve seen a big shift toward leisure travel, so we need to be more responsive to the needs of those travelers. For one thing, they’re requesting for more versatility on how they make and spend benefits, consisting of the opportunity to accumulate and redeem benefits near house.”
SkiftX talked with Hartley to acquire insight into how independent hotel brand names can compete with the larger chains by taking advantage of moving allegiances, increasing their marketing exposure, and improving their technology facilities.
SkiftX: Why do traditional hotel loyalty point systems no longer serve today’s travelers?
Chris Hartley: Many travelers questioned the value of loyalty programs even before Covid, considering that the majority of people just travel a few times each year. This concern around the worth of commitment programs just increased during the pandemic as individuals stayed at home. Fortunately, we were currently approaching broadening our local market offerings to increase loyalty engagement prior to the pandemic.
Through focus groups and customer research study we carried out in 2019, we set out to discover how clients want to engage with our hotels when they’re not taking a trip. The answer that emerged was that hotels ought to provide offers, special offers, and access to the hotel’s facilities such as pools, beach clubs, dining establishments, and health clubs to locals in the hotel’s location.
We took these insights into factor to consider when we reimagined our GHA Discovery program throughout the pandemic as part of a total relaunch, and it resonated with consumers stuck at home trying to find things to do. Through a single guest recognition and benefits proposal, GHA Discovery connects 40 brand names with more than 800 hotels spread throughout 100 nations (as of June 2022 when NH Hotel Group will have fully incorporated).
The objective is to produce a sense of neighborhood around a hotel and open the residential or commercial properties approximately residents. With people traveling again, we have a much better opportunity of capturing these consumers in among our other brands or across the network. Our commitment proposal might not appeal to company travelers as much as it did in the past, but this is something that brings value to the way individuals want to live and take a trip today. As part of that shift, we’ve produced a new rewards currency to spend in any outlet across our 800 hotels at any time of the year.
SkiftX: How can independent hotels groups compete with significant global brand names while keeping their individuality?
Hartley: Leisure travelers tend to seek out more genuine experiences than service tourists, who often reserve– or have their travel managers book– with the big name brand names based upon familiarity, security and the lowest possible price. So the individuality that smaller hotel brands tend to provide, versus a generic Marriott or Hilton, for example, provides an edge in this new market.
Nevertheless, these smaller brand names are likewise operating with significantly fewer resources when it comes to sales, marketing, and distribution. An alliance allows smaller brand names and hotel groups to compete on an international stage and gives them presence in markets that would typically be extremely tough for them to reach on their own, while enabling them to retain their independence.
The Leela Palaces, Hotels and Resorts, a luxury hotel chain in India, is a fine example. The typical worldwide leisure traveler entering India for the very first time would have typically never ever been exposed to the brand name, even though it is frequently recognized as one of the best luxury hotel brand names. Through the GHA Discovery loyalty platform, we put The Leela in front of 20 million consumers worldwide, broadening their footprint and making the most of visibility.
SkiftX: What function does technology play? What services and combination platforms do you supply to member brands and their hotels?
Hartley: In order to recognize visitors throughout all of our varied hotel groups, we knew we needed a strong innovation partner, and we are lucky to have had Oracle as an investor in the alliance from the first day. We understood we needed to bring all our brands onto a shared technology platform and have a centralized commitment program. This platform hosts and handles a commitment engine, a central consumer database, and an exclusive data set to catch member behavior, demographics, and preferences.
Clients are recognized at any point of entry into the alliance environment, whether through an online booking or an international distribution system (GDS) booking through a travel agent, and we track every single guest that has remained in any hotel throughout the network. All the information is handled and reported back to our brands. It produces a much more powerful company, both from the guest experience viewpoint and from a service and ROI perspective. And if hotel brand names have their own client relationship management (CRM) system, we can interface and align with their efforts.
We likewise offer deep-dive reporting abilities across brand name- and hotel-level functions at the touch of a button, empowering general managers to make better business choices and conserving them from needing to make considerable financial investments in technology.
SkiftX: How does the GHA Discovery program vary from traditional commitment programs?
Hartley: Individuals are looking for individuality, genuine experiences, and bespoke features– our GHA Discovery program embraces this brand-new world of travel by providing members acknowledgment, benefits, and rewards, whether they’re at house or away. Members delight in VIP access to hotel centers and amenities, with or without a stay, and our hotel partners benefit by acquiring incremental income.
Independent brand names realize the worth of our integrated commitment program, our innovation, and our member advantages, which are very much tailored to the needs of each market. We have sophisticated, larger brand names like Kempinski, Pan Pacific, and Anantara, in addition to store brand names with smaller sized portfolios like Nikki Beach, Capella, or Viceroy– so we deal with a large range of requirements. For example, we can offer extra marketing and branding assistance, CRM, tech assistance, improved integrations, and circulation support at no additional cost. The hotels just spend for efficiency, particularly when commitment members return to their homes. If there’s no repeat stay, there’s no charge.
This isn’t something the huge brand names can say– they charge much greater charges for royalties, along with marketing activities and circulation, and work quite at arm’s length. Our main objective is to help drive business to our hotels and to set them up for success, remembering that our brands are primarily owner-operators, therefore every dollar acquired or conserved is of direct benefit to the hotel owner.
For independent brands and their hotels, we provide remarkable reach, efficiently extending their portfolio to more than 800 hotels. We likewise promote them to our member base (soon to be 20 million members) and can extend that reach even further through our tactical partnerships. We just recently partnered with ASmallWorld to allow GHA Discovery members to tap into the travel and way of life network’s occasions and experiences, and to provide a chance for them to engage personally with a like-minded neighborhood. We also have a growing partnership with Star Alliance– the world’s largest worldwide airline alliance– and are checking out many other new collaboration opportunities.
SkiftX: To obtain from your relaunch project style, ‘Where to next?’, what will the future look like for Global Hotel Alliance and GHA Discovery?
Hartley: We have a huge year ahead of us. NH Hotel Group signs up with the Alliance in June, and that will take us from 500 to 800 hotels overnight, after which GHA Discovery will turn into one of the leading 10 hospitality commitment programs worldwide in terms of number of hotels and number of members. In the near future, the program will expand to enable the earn and burn of benefits with or without a stay, both inside and beyond our hotels. And over the next 5 years, GHA Discovery will continue to enhance its value proposal to use leisure travelers an even more effective alternative to the huge brand hospitality commitment programs, and hopefully we will continue to broaden and invite a lot more independent brands into the alliance household.
To learn more about membership in GHA go to Worldwide Hotel Alliance.
This content was produced collaboratively by Global Hotel Alliance and Skift’s branded material studio, SkiftX.