Carlson Wagonlit
Travel's hotel distribution division, RoomIt by CWT, last week announced its
Loyalty Booster program, which rewards corporate travelers with loyalty points
and air miles in order to increase traveler compliance and hotel attachment.
Loyalty Booster
already factored into CWT's RoomIt launch last July, but RoomIt president David Falter said the program has grown
in sophistication since then. "It was somewhat experimental, but it picked
up a lot of steam simply because we saw really, really great results and that
was with a fairly limited amount of inventory from a loyalty perspective"
he said.
Falter declined to
name specific companies that have signed on to participate but said the number
of companies and the breadth of the commercial commitments of their loyalty
assets have expanded since summer. In the past, CWT has worked with Hilton to
craft loyalty offerings to travelers. Long-term, Falter said, RoomIt hopes all
the major hotel companies will participate. Four companies currently are
onboard. The division also will explore other opportunities, such as adding a
loyalty credit card to the system.
"It's been really cool to be able to connect
these travelers to the brands that they already have loyalty to and give them
incentives that they would probably not be getting unless they were booking
outside the system in the past," Falter said. According to CWT figures,
during a two-month promotion that offered travelers 1,000 bonus hotel loyalty points
per eligible booking, hotel attachment increased 12 percent. Attachment rose
another 3 percent after the promotional period. CWT determines such promotional
periods, Falter said.
Loyalty Booster is
live for all RoomIt by CWT clients. Falter said last week's announcement was a
way to reaffirm to the industry and its own clients that RoomIt is focusing on
the Loyalty Booster offering. There's been a learning curve as the company
shifts from a B2B mind-set to more of a B2C mindset, he said.
The developments around
Loyalty Booster aren't the only changes to RoomIt since July. Originally
launched with a focus on small to midsize businesses, Falter said the division
now is focusing on the large corporate market. "We have a great access to
[the large corporate] marketplace through our mothership, CWT, but we also are
doing a lot of direct marketing and direct selling to large corporations about
unique hotel programs because that's where the money is in some ways,"
Falter said.
He continued, "With
the SMB marketplace, we're still very focused on that, but we think there's a
lot left to understand about it." For now, Falter said RoomIt is doing
deep research to better understand how to segment and better serve the SMB
market around the globe. While there's a fairly well established understanding
of SMBs in the U.S., he said, more work needs to be done to explore market
nuances outside North America. "It's giving us the opportunity to take a
step back and say, 'OK, do we really have enough data of how to be successful?'
You know: Build one core platform but make sure that core platform concerns the
idiosyncrasies and uniqueness of all these different local economies."
Falter estimated
RoomIt would relaunch its offering for the SMB market during the third quarter.