The Problem
Hotels, Resorts, and Vacation Rental companies continue to get better at driving direct traffic to their websites with smart branding, digital marketing, and loyalty programs. However, most visitors simply don’t convert. Recent research indicates that over 80% of online bookings are abandoned before the reservation is completed. Beyond retargeting ads, there is simply no great way to re-engage site visitors that don’t book.
On the flip side, online travel agencies and retailers have made sending emails to people that desert a shopping cart an expectation with today’s consumer. For many hotels and vacation rental companies, this is simply impossible. Connecting with those potential guests through outbound calls and automated emails is all but a dream.
As an example, TradeWinds Island Grand on St. Pete Beach in Florida dramatically increased their website traffic but didn’t see the revenue lift they had expected from so many people beginning the booking process.
Solution
TradeWinds began looking for a solution that could help capture and convert bounced booking engine inquiries. Ideally, people that entered their booking engine (SynXis) but didn’t complete their booking would push into their CRM as a new non-booked lead. Then have automatic emails sent to remind the potential guest about the property and drive engagement. Additionally, they needed a tight integration between their CRM and PMS (Visual One) to ensure that booked guests were not remarketed to as unbooked abandoned cart leads.
The Navis Shopping Cart Abandonment tool made this possible. Now as potential guests exit the site’s booking engine a new lead and any relevant data is pushed into Navis CRM. From there, automated emails and the Tradewinds’ reservation sales team follow up. The emails and outbound sales calls can be perfectly timed and informed by data describing the guests’ interests and historical reservation data syncing from the PMS. Navis also keeps their data clean – deduping new inquiries with existing guest records – so they end up with a single unified guest record. Navis even identifies related groups or households to improve communications with other family members.
Result
In the first six months after implementing the NAVIS Shopping Cart Abandonment tool, TradeWinds Island Grand experienced a significant increase in direct bookings. 1000 abandoned cart leads turned into 231 reservations and over $300,000 in incremental revenue.
In addition to the increased conversion rates and sales, Tradewinds significantly grew the size of their contact database adding 4x the usual number of leads. And because they collected the prospective guests’ preferences such as room type and time of year interest, their lifecycle emails became more personalized driving higher engagement and ultimately future revenue.
The NAVIS Shopping Cart Abandonment tool has helped us convert more revenue and allowed us to follow up with potential guests in an extremely targeted and personal way.
Travis Johnson, Vice President of Marketing at TradeWinds Island Grand
For this resort and many others, Navis Shopping Cart Abandonment drives occupancy, increases revenue & profit, and ensure that potential guests receive targeted and relevant messaging.