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
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 [...]
Hotel Marketing Strategy: How to Drive Direct Bookings and Why You Should
How do you define "guest experience"? It's everything that takes place once a guest arrives on your property, of course. But the travel research and booking experience are an equally important part of hotel marketing strategies—and one that pays off. Encouraging direct booking—and making sure that part of the experience is up to your standards—can increase revenue. That's the conclusion of a recent study from Kalibri Labs, reported in Hotel Management. Kalibri analyzed the costs [...]
Four Steps to Maximizing the Lifetime Value of Your Guests
In the world of consumer marketing, customer lifetime value (CLV) is a metric that is used to determine how much is reasonable to spend to acquire a new customer, or the customer acquisition cost (CAC). But for top-performing consumer-facing companies in the world, CLV is the metric on which business decisions are made. Here's why hoteliers should consider the lifetime value of their guests when making decisions about how to spend their marketing budgets: Repeat [...]
Three Ways Hotels Can Tell Their Brand Stories Across Multichannel Touchpoints
In storytelling, structure and formula are often important to creating a complete narrative. The traditional stories that you remember from your childhood are often simple and easy to compose - they have a beginning, deepening action, a climactic moment, and a resolution. There is usually a hero and a villain. And, invariably, the plot is told in chronological order by a trusted narrator. Aware of the power of stories to hold an audience, brands have [...]
Strategies for Winning the Direct Booking Wars
It’s been a busy year on the “book direct” front. Hotels of all sizes are facing off against established and emerging online travel agencies (OTAs) and meta sites. At the same time, lines are blurring, with OTAs continuing to expand their business services for hotels and the industry moving towards ‘meta metasearch’ (for another post). But generally, hotels are testing a wide range of strategies to win back share from OTAs, which take costly commission [...]
Hospitality industry pain points: Strategies for hoteliers by hoteliers
We always enjoy getting our customers together to discuss their experiences as hoteliers in a rapidly-evolving history. Not only do we get to learn about their pain points, but they get to discuss with one another and brainstorm for future success. Earlier this month, we hosted an executive roundtable event with customers from the Boston/Cape Cod area. Participants hailed mostly from independent properties, including the Charles Hotel in Cambridge and the Lenox Hotel in Boston, [...]