Hotel Moment
WITH KAREN STEPHENS


Episode 146
Winning the holiday rush: Top trends and proven plays for BFCM | A Revinate webinar
In this week’s episode of Hotel Moment, we’re featuring a webinar from our series, Hotel Moment Deep Dive, to get you prepped. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Travel Tuesday are fast approaching, and we’re sharing the information you need to capitalize on peak season demand and execute revenue-driving campaigns with offers guests are looking for.
Revinators Anisha Yadav, VP Customer and Product Marketing, Sara Green, Customer Success Manager, and Freya Craig, Sr. Customer & Product Marketing Manager, run through some of the latest US market research — highlighting key travel patterns from guests to focus on to maximize their spend on property. The team also details how you can move past the traditional “heads in beds” approach and make the guest experience personal, whether that’s over the phone or from a mobile booking.
Tune in and find out how to attract your most profitable guests.

Meet your host
As Chief Marketing Officer at Revinate, Karen Stephens is focused on driving long-term growth by building Revinate’s brand equity, product marketing, and customer acquisition strategies. Her deep connections with hospitality industry leaders play a key role in crafting strategic partnerships.
Karen is also the host of The Hotel Moment Podcast, where she interviews top players in the hospitality industry. Karen has been with Revinate for over 11 years, leading Revinate’s global GTM teams. Her most recent transition was from Chief Revenue Officer, where she led the team in their highest booking quarter to date in Q4 2023.
Karen has more than 25 years of expertise in global hospitality technology and online distribution — including managing global accounts in travel and hospitality organizations such as Travelocity and lastminute.com
Watch the video
Transcript
[00:00:00] Sara Green: The gut reaction for many hotels. Is just to slash prices. We know the phrase ‘heads and beds’, and it’s simple. We want people in our rooms no matter the cost. Yes. It is a short term burst in occupancy, but it comes with some serious long term consequences if he values your brand.
[00:00:22] Karen Stephens (Intro): Welcome to the Hotel Moment podcast presented by Revinate, the podcast where we discuss how hotel technology shapes every moment of the hotelier’s experience. Tune in for our guest episodes where we explore the cutting edge technology transforming the hospitality industry and hear from experts and visionaries shaping the future of guest experiences. Alongside our conversations with guests, we have episodes for you hosted by Revinator, Brenna Turpin, on resources available to you all. These resource packed episodes have granular advice on overcoming industry and operational challenges so you can emerge as a hotel superhero. Whether you’re a hotelier or a tech enthusiast, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive in and discover how we can elevate hospitality together.
[00:01:08] Brenna Turpin: As a hotelier, you have three major holidays to pay attention to before Christmas and New Year’s. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and now the increasingly popular Travel Tuesday. To give you an idea of how important it is to plan campaigns for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, last year, the Hotel Network gathered global data to find that hotel website campaigns for these holidays increased direct bookings by 64%. 64%. That’s significant. And we’re sure you have campaigns lined up to capture direct bookings via your brand website, but if you include the email and the voice channel as part of your campaigns, you’re going to have more opportunities to reach your guests, collect their data, and personalized offers for them to boost and sell your revenue. And on a global scale, travel Tuesday is taking place on December 2nd and is starting to become one of the most anticipated holidays in hospitality. Hotel bookings on that day were up 28% compared to a two week window before and after the holiday last year. And this year, guests are likely to keep their eyes out for the best of the best deals, especially since inflation is still breathing down their necks in The US and other parts of the world. Pay attention to your mobile channels, mobile bookings, and offer mobile only perks to capture guests’ search for convenience. And don’t be afraid to slot in offers for your loyalty program as this can be a prime time for members to rack up rewards. We’re still months away from these holidays, but the time is now if you wanna prepare like an expert. The webinar we’re featuring today from our Hotel Moment Deep Drive series covers the latest industry trends and how to adapt your offers for maximum appeal, how to capitalize on peak season demand by leveraging Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Travel Tuesday to fill your booking pipeline well into the new year. We’ll also show you how to implement proven revenue driving campaigns from top performing hotels that use segmentation to maximize conversions.
[00:03:00] Anisha Yadav: Excited to welcome everybody to the session, our first of our three series webinar here on winning the holiday rush. It’s that time of the year again, and we’re gonna cover some top trends and proven successful examples from Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Travel Tuesday. So let’s get started. Before we jump in, quick introductions. I am Anisha Yadav, and I lead the customer and product marketing at Revinate. Super excited to have two of my colleagues join me, so I’ll let them introduce themselves. Sara, you wanna go first.
[00:03:28] Sara Green: Hi, everybody. Thanks so much for joining. My name’s Sara Green, and I work on the customer success team for North America here at Revinate. Thanks again for joining.
[00:03:37] Freya Craig: Hi, everyone. I’m Freya, senior customer and product marketing manager at Revinate, and excited to see you all here today.
[00:03:45] Anisha Yadav: Awesome. So we have the experts joining us today. So super excited to get Sara and Freya kind of share examples, their expertise throughout this webinar. So kind of wanted to kick off with a quick overview of what we’re covering. So we’d start with the industry trends, some data that is out there, lot of exciting stuff, lot of changes that are kind of happening in the market. We lead into some examples of tactics that we’re seeing are actually driving results for hoteliers like yourself, and also some examples from 2024 of what actually works from a strategy perspective and real examples of customers that drove revenue to our platform. I’ll address the industry trends here. So we’ll kind of cover what’s changing from a consumer preference perspective and also look at some of the market data that we’re seeing from hospitality forecasting companies. This is a survey that was conducted by FocusWire and AB Tasty, which kind of talks about the question is, what would make the guest experience more personal when they’re booking travel online? So three themes that stand out, personalization that is gonna be done through guest data, so not just thinking through the rooms, but the total spend of the guests right from pre stay to post stay and looking at the spend patterns, the booking behavior, and the RFM model. Right? So the recency of the stay, the frequency of their stay across your portfolio properties, and what’s the monetary value of that stay across your food and beverage, your spa, and obviously your rooms. So using those data points to really customize the offer for the guests. And the last one, a bit more tactical, but I’m sure you all have heard about this. It’s super important to get website and cart abandonment campaigns triggered. So this is the high intent audience that’s there on your website. So how do you make sure that you’re capturing those data points and really using those data points to trigger personalized campaigns to get that intent to a booking? And couple more questions that kind of stood out to us, and we wanted to share that from consumer preference perspective. So these two are kind of focused on inspiration and conversion. So you can kind of see on the bucket on the left side, inspiration in terms of reviews and recommendations that really improves travel and leveraging AB testing to see where you can place these reviews on your landing pages and see what’s kind of driving the conversions. And on the right side, again, speaking more to what makes your property stand out. So if it’s location, especially as we get into, you know, next year with the FIFA tournament and Olympics is coming in 2028. Really being strategic with the messaging of how you are presenting your property, making sure you’re talking about your location, the distance from these stadiums, etcetera, because that’s what’s what we’re seeing from these responses will drive the conversion. And bringing it home with this point here, so I think we all have kind of read about this already, but guest feedback is really important. And that is kind of the new AI engine that’s feeding information about your properties from the UGCs or the user generated content, and it makes your property stand out in comparison to the competitors and other assets that are there in the location. Okay. So shifting guess towards a little bit more on the market data from a forecasting perspective. So what you’re seeing here is data points that were presented by HDC at the hotel data conference by STAR. So that’s kind of the source of this revised forecast. This is, again, as of July 2025. So what we’re looking at here is continuation with bifurcation. You can kind of see that and upscale are performing really well, and all the gains are coming from the ADR. So the occupancy grid and the green color there is pretty minimal. And as we move on to the right of the slide, you can see upper scale to pretty much economy and independent. There is a decline in demand. So you can see the green decline, which is occupancy and also ADR that was kind of leading us to full year forecast being negative for this star class of properties. And what is causing the decline in demand? So, again, we read about this a lot for folks from North America on this webinar. There is an international visitors decline that we’re seeing. So you can kind of see this chart represents Jan through almost June this year. And there is a lot of displacement of this North America traffic inbound to other international locations. So Sara and I were discussing this earlier that there is if you’re logging into this webinar from Europe, from Central Asia, South America, any international location, look out for those US travelers that are going outbound to you, and they are prepping other locations. So we actually have that on the next section that we can kind of map out again. The source of this data is from the tourism economics, this data point around international visitors arrival by region. So you can kinda see the dark blue color kind of indicates the increase over 2024. So what we’re seeing here from this data is that North America decline is benefiting other markets and potential displacement. Again, this is potential based on the data. It kind of shows the increase in Europe, South America, Central America, and also if you see Middle East has a light blue bar that’s spiking up for 2026. And here, again, we’re looking at this data from the hotel data conference that was presented. It’s really important to understand the micro segment of this overall trend of declining international traffic. So what does that mean? If you look at this chart here, on the left side, we’re looking at the international visitor spending per capita for 2024, for last year. So if you are in the highest spending location by state, you’ve definitely seen decline in your property, so you wanna make sure you’re thinking through what are the strategies that you can put in place to replace that demand. However, if you’re on the right side, which is the lowest states, you would really are not seeing that impact for your property. So really, again, it’s important to see the macro trend, but also for the go into the micro segment data to see that’s really impacting the location of your assets. Another interesting survey, a point that was shared again by hotel data conference, the source of it is on the bottom, which is trust tomorrow. And it, again, kind of talks about I mean, the survey responses to barriers to international long haul in 2025. So you’re seeing what are the top reasons why people are not traveling abroad. And I think Priya, myself, and Sara were looking at this data, and and we wanted to share that there is a huge opportunity for hotels in North America to really capitalize on this domestic demand. Right? So people are not going abroad, but they do wanna travel, take road trips, stay within North America. So do you have the tools to be able to segment that audience? Really market to folks who are looking to take that road trip, looking to be in that drive market area, and really making most of that data that you have of the guest and coming up with packages, with experiences that cater to them. So this is exciting. We were putting together this content. Again, the theme here is around major upcoming events. So fresh off the press, it’s happening this week. So we’re looking at the fan week, which had the record breaking attendance for 2025 US Open. So, again, I was looking at specific data points that kind of talk about how sports travel is expected to increase overall by 17.5% from now to 2030. So this is a huge data point to kind of look at what’s gonna happen as we kind of progress. And next year with FIFA, which is gonna be, again, kicking off in North America with about 48 international countries being represented, 104 games, and this is from June 11 to 07/19/2026. So we’ve kinda flashed here the cities and countries that are hosting it. So, again, if you’re on this call, if you’re on this map, really thinking through the revenue and demand surge strategies that you should be already using. We were looking at the data points and already the ADRs are up by 45%, uh, for these cities. So, again, that’s a huge demand. So what are the experiences, packages, post event activities that you can put together for your properties, you know, be it fan gatherings, be it watch parties? So thinking for those experiences and really making sure that you have a plan already put together because the demand’s gonna hit. And interestingly, that’s all gonna be between our Black Friday, Saturday, Monday as we kind of go into the holiday season. So really important to keep that in mind. So speaking of experiences, moving on to what else is moving the needle. So we’re really seeing food and beverage strategies drive that RevPAR in terms of the holistic asset, not just rooms. And within that, we’re seeing experiential dining, so making sure that you’re kind of catering to that upper tier luxury traveler, making sure that you have the tech tools in place to know their preferences before they arrive on property, and then making sure the operations team has the technology to deliver, like, learn the experiences and deliver that promise of the service on property to making sure, again, that you are focusing on making every guest that checks in a promoter. So, again, super important thing through the food and beverage experiences in general that you can provide on property. Okay. So with that, I’ll pass on to Sara to kind of talk us through some of the learnings that we’ve seen from past market uncertainties.
[00:12:55] Sara Green: Thanks, Anisha. Agreed. I think it’s important to just quickly recall similar times that the market was in kind of a similar state of uncertainty. Like most industries, the hospitality industry is really kind of always in a state of constant rhythm from the great recession back in 2008 all over then going through to recent pandemic of COVID that we all know and remember all too well. This industry’s resilience has been tested time and time again. And today, we’re not just gonna look back and look at things that we shouldn’t do. We’re also going to suggest on ways to improve and workarounds so we’re not making the same mistakes again. But I think two common responses jump out from looking in the past, and that’s deep rate discounts and then aggressive cost cutting. So let’s talk about both, uncover alternatives to these reactions so we don’t make the same mistakes again. So by concentrating on your customer data and marketing on a more personalized level, which is what customers want anyway, will ensure just a much easier path back to what we all consider normal. So let’s kick things off by talking about a common mistake that we saw during these times, and it’s panic discounting or just deep discounting. And it’s really the gut reaction for many hotels. It’s just to slash prices. We know the phrase, heads and beds, and it’s simple. We want people in our rooms no matter the cost. Yes. It is a short term burst in occupancy, but it comes with some serious long term consequences if he values your brand. And I ask you, think about it this way. When you compete on price alone, you’re telling your guest that your hotel is a commodity and not that unique experience. You’re teaching them to not just look for a deal, but to wait for that deal. And, yeah, who doesn’t love a good deal? But once you set that new low price, it’s incredibly tough to raise that back up. Guests get used to paying less, and suddenly you’re in that race to the bottom. So rebuilding your brand’s value after a period of this deep discounting can take years, which I think if we’ve all worked in these two most recent examples I mentioned, we can be very familiar with. A smarter approach is to focus on value adds, not those price cuts, and just be creative with it, like complimentary parking, free breakfast, something more tailored, like special packages, like work from home packages that we saw. They’re great for weekdays. And how cool would it be a customer had this example, so I wanted to read it. It included an office setup, so which included a premium room with a comfortable desk chair, a large monitor, a printer scanner upon request, probably just front desk. You could also include a tech kit, so that could come with, like, a phone charger, an extra HDMI cable. And I think they included a mouse pad, like, a logoed mouse pad, so that was cute. Or another example I grabbed was family fun staycation, and then this includes a fun welcome kit. And upon arrival, each child in this gets a special staycation survival kit, which is so cute. And it includes a special lanyard for each child with VIP all access pass, a scavenger hunt map, and then a couple of snacks. So, again, you can be very creative and even throw in a water bottle. The key here is to protect your brand’s integrity. Don’t confuse occupancy with long term brand equity. Another knee jerk reaction we saw was aggressive cost cutting. And we’re talking about everything from, gosh, this was reducing staff hours, eliminating some amenities, and even delaying maintenance. So, yes, it was to protect the bottom line, but it overlooked one of the most fundamental principles of our industry. Hospitality is all about people. It’s a hospitality is a people first industry. So when you cut staff, wait times go up, attention to detail goes down, that personal touch that makes a hotel stay special gets lost. So when you cut corners on things like room cleaning, toiletries, dining options, guests notice that immediately, and I know your front office will be the first ones to agree with that. We saw this firsthand during the pandemic. Hotels were charging record high rates, but guests arrived to find limited restaurant hours, amenities not even available, and the result was a huge decrease in perceived value of their say. And then this decline in guest satisfaction just quickly translate into negative online reviews on sites like Google, Tripadvisor, like Anisha was saying, this is kind of the new online AI translation of how successful you’re doing. These reviews can have a devastating impact on future bookings, so that’s why it’s critical to maintain that high level of service even in tough times or just make sure you’re clearly setting that correct expectation for your guests. So how to do that? I know I’ve just said what not to do or what we’ve learned from these past trying times. How do we do that? How do we shift from price to value? So let’s focus on the good stuff, what to do instead. The core of a successful strategy here is to move away from attracting guests solely on price, and instead, focus on what truly adds value to them and them alone. The great place to start is with your past guests. You already have their data. You have that relationship or they have that relationship with your brand, and you can use their past say information to create personalized offers. So for example, if it’s a couple traveling without children and you know that they’re celebrating an anniversary, why not offer them a couple’s retreat or romance package add on or some sort of amenity? And then if it’s a family, offer them an upgrade to a family suite or just some kids’ amenities or snacks. You can target new markets, like, maybe perhaps think about markets that aren’t as affected during these trying times. Like, maybe it’s the leisure market, travelers, remote workers, like I mentioned, staycation. As Anisha mentioned, if folks are looking for more of that road trip time or road trip stay, then go ahead and start targeting geolocation. You wanna create specific packages for marketing campaigns just for them. And then always personalization is the key. Use the data that you have, and this can be from a number of things. This can be from past days, loyalty programs, even the feedback that they’re giving you to understand your guest preferences. You wanna acknowledge special occasions like birthdays with a handwritten note or even just a small amenity. It’s just about making them feel seen and valued and not just another booking. And then finally, how to implement these specific value ads. I know that sounds easier said than done, but there’s some really great tactics to use instead of just immediately discounting. So instead of offering heavy discounts, let’s talk about just some specific value add tactics that can work. One thing that I know always stands out is outbound call strategy. And if you do have a res team on-site, imagine your staff calling a past guest to personally thank them for that stay that they’ve just left. And, yes, we can absolutely set that up with an email, but that outbound call is so much more personalized, and this feels like a much more personal approach than just a generic email. And then what about outlet credits? So another idea is to offer food and spa credits instead of just that percentage off the room rate. So instead of saying, hey, 40% off of this, how about stay three nights and get a $50 spa credit? And then that feels like kind of a bonus rather than a discount. And it also encourages the guests to stay on property. You know what they do when they stay on property. They’re gonna spend more money with you. Or how about book direct and you get a free meal? Now notice I didn’t say dinner. I didn’t specify the meal, and just be smart and strategic with the fine print. Maybe it’s during a weekday when you’re slower and you need to fill the outlets anyway. Maybe it’s a special limited menu, excludes alcohol,anything. But just, again, have fun thinking about it, involve other department heads, and just be creative with your value adds. I mean, you can create unique value packages that bundle services and enhance the guest’s experience. I know I mentioned a few before, but I do have a few extra examples from customers that I wanted to read to you. So for families, I had a customer use the family fun package that included, uh, themed entertainment. So they hosted a nightly family activity, and this was a movie night on one night in one of their meeting rooms with a projector, some popcorn. They had board game Olympics in a common area, and then a pajama party with milk and cookies. And I loved that p j’s were required even for adults. I would have made that a rule. I mean, to sum it up really, the key is to move away from deep discounting. You’re leveraging your customer data to personalize and just make them feel seen and heard. You’re offering genuine value instead of just a lower price. And as we’re all here to say, it’s about engaging directly with your customers and building that lasting relationship.
[00:21:56] Anisha Yadav: Awesome. Some really great tactics and real life examples from our expert, Sara. So thank you so much, Sara, for sharing those and taking that a step further. So let’s now look at some data driven tactics that we are seeing that are driving revenue for our hotels. So this is basically a summary of themes that we’re seeing from our customers globally from January to about July 2025. You can see on the yellow circle, I’ve kind of revenue. So we’re seeing about 69,000,000 revenue through across these themes that we’re gonna share and talk more about. But keep in mind that we also have more examples of specific hotels that have implemented these tactics on our scene revenue, and Freya will talk about that in a bit. But let’s look at the themes that are performing. So similar to what Sara mentioned, it’s not about deep discounting. It’s about how do you build that value for your asset for those rooms that you have. So when we talk about attribute base, again, we’re looking at it from a lens of email and voice. Right? So if this is an omnichannel tactic that can be implemented for reservations that you already have on the book, so you build arrivals in specific room types, Can you kick off an email as part of the pre arrival process that can further monetize specific attributes of the group? So be it higher room types, maybe there’s a better location, a better view from a specific room, or looking at interconnecting rooms. Right? So as we kind of saw the summer travel has a lot of family travelers coming in, so there is a demand for interconnection. So can you monetize that attribute of rooms that have that connection already built in? So, again, examples of some of the subject lines that we’re seeing from these tactics too and the fact that these are email and voice. The next one is about booking behavior. Again, this is connecting back to the trend that we’re seeing from a consumer travel, really learning about the length of state patents with different market segments that are staying at your property. The repeat guests, are you rewarding them with exclusive early access as we kind of kick into the holiday season? And thinking of specific days too. So if you have a softer Monday as an example, can you do a special sale or a a rate that could let that existing guest add that Monday night because that’s softer for your property? So these tactical strategies to drive demand from a high intent already existing book of business is something that you need to think about. And, again, if you have a reservations team on-site, can you do an outbound campaign that’s focused on driving demand for that slow day of that’s upcoming for your property? So, again, some ideas on the subject line on the right. The next one talks about experiences. We’ve spoken a lot about that. Sara gave you a lot of examples of how we’re seeing hotels implement that. But, again, having a hatch of total RevPAR, not just room RevPAR. Again, thinking through golf, spa, wellness, adventure. What can you offer to the guests who are coming in? And, again, building that package that’s higher in terms of the value that you’re delivering for your assets. And, again, if you have a reservations team, can you do an outbound campaign to upsell your existing reservations on these experiences that exist on your property? And the last one here talks about weather and location. Again, as we’re seeing, there’s a lot of demand coming into North America next year for FIFA, and there will be for LA Olympics as well. It’s really important to talk about the location where you are. What are the attributes that make you different from your competitors? How far are you from these locations that are hosting these events? So making sure that you’re speaking to that on your email communications, through your web pages, through any integrated marketing campaign that you’re doing, and, again, understanding and learning those preferences of the guests and using those data points to market to them. So with that, I’ll pass on to Freya to walk us through some real life, real customer revenue generating backside cyber monies inspirational campaigns.
[00:25:43] Freya Craig: Well, thank you, Anisha. I have five examples to go through here. So hopefully, we’ll be able to pull some inspiration for this year’s Black Friday Cyber Monday. So the first one I wanted to start with was this campaign from the Tides In as we come up on Black Friday Cyber Monday. If you’re a revenue customer, you might know that we recently added a countdown timer into our email composer. And so that’s what makes it really easy to highlight time bound offers and drive urgency, both which are really critical as we come up on Cyber Week. So here with this campaign, the Tides Inn used the countdown timer to drive over 300 room nights for their summer sale. And we typically see click through rates go up a little with when you implement this countdown timer, so it’s a great one to include for all upcoming sales. And if you haven’t checked it out, I would test this one over Black Friday, Cyber Monday. The next one we have is from Alisa Ranch. This is a geo targeted campaign that gave early access to locals for their sale. So like Sara had mentioned, location based segmenting is a great option and a great way to go, and it really was successful for Aliso Ranch here. They also did three strategic sends of this campaign. So the first one went to the entire segment. The second one was resent to everyone who didn’t open that first email. And then the third one went to everyone who had opened but not clicked it. So here, they targeted everyone within a 120 miles of the property, and it led to more than a 190 room nights booked by their guests. And then as you can see too, they also had a push for their gift shop, so that really drove some ancillary revenue for the property as well. So a great example here of how smart segmentation combined with well timed follow ups and a broader revenue push can help your property up. This one’s from AutoCAMP. Last Black Friday, Cyber Monday, they ran a very successful nature over things campaign, and it was designed and sent from the group level to drive cross property bookings and had one really clear message. Shows that was 40% off all upcoming stays in 2025. So they did a few things that made this campaign really successful. One was their smart segmenting. So as you can see, they excluded OTA domains, and they also excluded all feature reservations. The second thing that made this really successful was their cross channel consistency with both the visuals and the messaging. So those were consistent across digital display and social. So they were able to carry that message throughout and really capture guests at all stage of the guest journey. And then third, this was obviously a time bound offer over the holiday weekend. And as you can see, it was super successful with over 1,600,000.0 in direct bookings. And if you were at Navigate, you probably heard the team talk about the successes with this one. Not only did it drive a ton of bookings, but it also strengthened their brand presence. So this is a great one from the AutoCAMP team. Okay. This one I wanted to call out. This is an automated campaign from InterContinental Oakwell Long Beach Resort, and it promotes their on-site amenities to guests. So this campaign is sent one day after guests check-in, and it features their dining options, various spa treatments, unique activities, and offers that the hotel is running. It also includes the best way to communicate with the property. So that both elevates the guest satisfaction, and it also drove a ton of incremental revenue for the property. And this really goes along with the trend that Anisha talked about earlier about experiences being key to driving revenue. So a great one from InterContinental here. And a great one to implement as you head into the holiday season and ongoing. And then finally, I have the last one from The Landmark London. They ran a limited time offer that called out their need dates. So here, their need dates were from November to April, and they only ran this campaign for three to four days. But as you can see, it was really successful and drove the property over 555 room nights. So I think this is just a good one to highlight. It you can really fill those need dates with a simple campaign. So I wanted to include this one as an example. And that’s all we have. And, Anisha, do you wanna start taking us through the key takeaways?
[00:29:55] Anisha Yadav: Awesome. Thanks so much, Freya. Those are such amazing and inspiring examples to see. And, again, if you want more inspiration, you can go on to devinate.com/inspiration where you can access more success stories from hotels like yourself. So to summarize and bring us home, I’ll kick off the first takeaway. Like you mentioned, keep the industry trends in mind. Personalization is key. Location matters. And put on your hat for next year for FIFA, for LA Olympics. It’s gonna happen further down in in 2028. But you wanna make sure you’re keeping these in mind as the demand generation’s already kind of in place. Your guests are looking for auctions in these locations. So let’s start planning ahead already.
[00:30:37] Sara Green: Awesome. Second key takeaway is to use that guest data and their preferences to craft compelling campaigns. We did see after I spoke, we saw some amazing tactics that Anisha went over, and there were several examples of different subject lines that you could use. So I would definitely share if you have a couple of ideas, you know, hey. What’s gonna work better? This subject line or this subject line, what better way than to start than to try AP testing and seeing what’s gonna get you the most opens, the most clicks, you know, whatever you set. Again, if you are starting to kinda come up with it with smart segmenting and crafting these creative campaigns. So great suggestion.
[00:31:16] Freya Craig: Sara, another key takeaway is to plan ahead for this cyber week this year. It’s never too late to start planning ahead. I know we’re still two and a half, three months out, but it’s not too late. And I know, Sara, you often see campaigns say
[00:31:30] Sara Green: Always. Yeah. I was going to jump in. I love that you said that. I saw the best success this past year when folks came up with a schedule for even into October and just had a couple of scheduled campaigns referencing Black Friday, but they were calling it a week. They were being creative. And I think it just goes back to think about your own personal inbox on Black Friday and then Cyber Monday and then travel Tuesday. How many emails do you get on a daily basis and how many do you actually click and engage with? I just go through and just mass delete. So that’s why we’re seeing the better success with starting and scheduling these campaigns sooner. And, again, just being crafty, how can you stand outside the box and, yeah, be creative.
[00:32:17] Freya Craig: And our last takeaway here is to activate omnichannel campaigns across the guest life cycle, and we saw AutoCAMP had great success with this. So just a reminder to keep that in mind.
[00:32:28] Anisha Yadav: Awesome. So moving on to the next section where we just wanted to kind of give you a reminder on upcoming sessions that are here. This is the first of the three series webinar that we’re doing, all focused on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Travel Tuesday. So make sure you sign up for webinar two and webinar three. And just a quick reminder on the next section about direct booking mastery certification, we’re really excited that this is already live. We’ve gone through the first and second theme already. This month’s all about segmentation strategies as upsell, cross sell, lead nurture campaigns, and OTA win back as well. So make sure you sign up and get certified. You can also feature your certificate on LinkedIn to get extra exposure. So just wanna give a quick shout here to this program. And with that, we’re at the end of our session. Thank you again for joining us, and we’ll see you on our second webinar pretty soon.
[00:33:21] Freya Craig: Thank you.
[00:33:22] Sara Green: Thanks, everybody.
[00:33:24] Anisha Yadav: Thank you.
[00:33:28] Karen Stephens (Outro): Thank you for joining us on this episode of Hotel Moment by Revinate. Our community of hoteliers is growing every week, and each guest we speak to is tackling industry challenges with the innovation and flexibility that our industry demands. If you enjoyed today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and leave a review. And if you’re listening on YouTube, please like the video and subscribe for more content. For more information, head to revinate.com/hotelmomentpodcast. Until next time, keep innovating.