Flip.to helps hotels & restaurants boost their brand & earn more guests.
Denihan Hospitality Group has recently signed up all of their hotel brands with Flip.to, a marketing engine that engages guests to boost brand awareness and earn new guests. Owners/operators of Affinia and The James brands, and luxury independents including The Benjamin and The Surrey in NYC, Denihan was the inspiration for Flip.to’s latest feature – a component that converts anonymous website visitors into future guests.
The James Chicago was the first Denihan hotel to launch Flip.to back in early 2010. Flip.to, at its core, is a service that integrates with a hotel’s website and booking engine that turns their existing guests into a huge team of trusted advocates, spreading the word about customers’ upcoming trips and where they’ll be staying out to their social networks. On average, over 25% of The James’ guests engage with Flip.to. This means that 1 in 4 of their guests have become an extension of their marketing force, leading to tremendous reach and soaring past industry averages for marketing campaigns.
Hotels convert a fairly small percentage of people visiting their websites into booked guests. While those reasons are obvious to most, the difficult challenge for hotels is they never learn who those people are, and then lose the opportunity to communicate with them over time. A new feature of Flip.to helps convert those ordinarily anonymous visitors into a pool of future guests.
John Moser, Chief Brand and Marketing Officer of Denihan, was interested in how Flip.to might engage anyone visiting their hotels’ websites, not just existing guests. That was the spark that led to a new product to be launched this summer. “We know from research that our most powerful marketing tool is referral from our current customers. Flip.to has enabled us to bring the voice of our customers into the sales process,” states Moser.
When a website visitor lands on the hotel’s website, Flip.to will now show a post or review from a recent guest making the page immediately more personable. From there, Flip.to highlights the incentive (a room upgrade or discounted room rate, for example) that a particular guest earned for sharing his or her thoughts, compliments of the hotel.
The goal here is to drive that anonymous visitor towards booking a room before leaving the site. But, if they are not ready to secure a reservation at that stage, in just two clicks they can lock in an incentive for themselves that’s valid for a set period of time. This allows Flip.to provide the hotel with a new means to communicate with potential new guests over time, via friendly reminders.
Anonymous visitors then have time to determine whether or not to exercise the incentive option or pass it along to one of their friends or followers. This process achieves several goals; incentivizing anonymous visitors or their friends to book a room in the short term, and if they don’t, allowing the hotel to continuously communicate with these visitors with the goal of converting them into guests sometime in the future.
Throughout this process, the hotel learns who that visitor is- including the individual’s name, email address, and profile photo- and builds a deep pool of future guests with whom to engage.
This new Flip.to feature provides an even bigger boost to a hotel brand’s return on engagement, and also tacks on a trackable means to monitor return on investment.