The world’s largest hotel loyalty program was freshly renamed, repositioned and rebranded and needed to grab the maximum share of stays from its members for the last 4 months of the year. But reduced budgets combined with differing business needs by region made the industry standard “stay N nights, get N points” promotion both too expensive and not particularly effective. 

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We had a novel proposal. By mining 18 months of transactional data, we would be able to create individualized sets of hurdles to incentivize incremental stays & spend among members, creating the world’s first global personalized hotel promotion.

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The concept showcased all the ways the consumer could win with IHG and how that ‘win’ was personalized to them. One of >400K offer combos were assigned to all 80MM+ existing and new members. The personalized responsive-design website displayed individuals’ promotion combinations, hurdle status & badges via daily data updates. The promotion was translated into 13 languages and promoted across IHG’s owned media channels and through paid media.

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The results were unprecedented:

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• It was IHG’s most successful multi-brand campaign ever: $360MM in revenue with >$85MM incremental revenue, exceeding projections by 58%. 

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• Generated at least 2X (3X in AMER) the incremental revenue at ½ the cost of past promos in all regions. 

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• Superior email engagement, 54-88% open rate.

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• >465K registrants, highest number ever.

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• +16% higher email/SMS opt-in rate vs previous campaigns.

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The promotion was repeated for five years, 2013-2018.

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“It is not often that a promotion gets me excited enough to want me to modify all of our future travel plans.”

 

“Much like with Crack the Case, this promo has me strategizing my remaining 2013 stays all within IHG. Well done. It is doing its job.”

 

“More interesting than a straightforward bonus, and, as you say, it makes me think about IHGRC a bit more than I otherwise would. They really are promoting behavior that equates to loyalty.”