Karen Stephens
Chief Marketing Officer
Karen Stephens drives long-term growth by building Revinate’s brand equity, product marketing, and customer acquisition strategies. With more than 25 years of expertise in global hospitality technology and online distribution, her deep connections with hospitality industry leaders play a key role in crafting strategic partnerships. She is also the host of The Hotel Moment Podcast, where she interviews top players in the hospitality industry.
Featured articles
Industry Leaders Share Their Insights on the Future of Travel
Towards the end of last year, Skift and McKinsey & Company teamed up on a report targeted at travel executives to help them understand the state of the travel market. Through interviews with travel leaders from around the globe, the researchers found insights that will help hoteliers plan for recovery. The report discussed five main themes that hoteliers should know about the future of travel: 1. There is latent demand for travel. “Customers are interested [...]
Segmenting Your Database
Great hospitality feels personal. When you step inside a hotel and you’re warmly greeted by a hotelier, you feel special. If you’re remembered from a past visit, the experience is magical. But that feeling doesn’t need to be limited to on-premise experiences. By segmenting your database and personalizing your email messages to each segment, you can elicit that same feeling for your guests when they open your email. But, doing it well requires creativity, great [...]
Hotel marketing automation: why most setups underperform — and how to fix yours
Most hoteliers turn on automation and expect revenue to follow. Sometimes it does. More often, the numbers come back soft: open rates are fine, conversions are flat, attribution is hard to defend, and the same campaigns keep running month after month without much movement. The reason is rarely the automation. It sits a layer below in the guest data the campaigns read from. Hotels may not think to look there until a few weeks or [...]
How hotels can succeed in the changing world of metasearch
Metasearch is a tool that many potential guests use to research their trips and most look at many sites before they book. It’s a way for potential guests to see your hotel compared to others and make an informed choice of where to book. It’s also a great way to attract first-time stays, bringing them into the CRM so you can market to them directly in the future. You can’t afford not to be represented. [...]
5 Common Mistakes Hoteliers Make When Segmenting Emails
With 89% of marketers using email as their primary channel for lead generation, consumers are being inundated with messages from brands. Will your messages be ignored or deleted or opened and clicked? The answer depends on how good a job you do at segmenting your database and sending relevant, timely emails. Generic email blasts are as passe as requiring bathing caps in the pool. These blasts not only contribute to low open and click-through rates, [...]
AI and Machine Learning in Hospitality: Part II
As covered in Part I of this series, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are becoming more and more prevalent across all industries. In Part II, we’ll dive deeper into hospitality specific use cases for these technologies, helping you as a hotelier understand guest needs and preferences like never before. From smarter marketing to hyper-segmentation Sending the same marketing message to an entire database means you’re going to get a small bite from [...]