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Located in Lethbridge, Alberta, the Best Western Heidelberg Inn is a member of the Best Western hotel chain – the world’s largest hotel chain with more than 2,400 hotels in North America alone. With responsibility for business development at the hotel, Wayne Dwornik is tasked with building enduring relationships with profitable corporate clients, personalizing the hotel shopping experience and ultimately driving hotel room occupancy rates. To do this, Dwornik required a means of personalizing marketing messages, delivering them in a cost-effective format and capturing key information from each interaction with hotel guests and potential travelers. Having some previous experience with both Maximizer and Act!, Dwornik opted to use Maximizer to support his business development efforts. In a single year the hotel has seen a 12% jump in hotel occupancy while adding to administrative efficiency with help from the new system.
Targeting Corporate Business for Growth
In the highly- competitive travel accommodation industry, travelers have a wide array of accommodation options available to them – making it very easy for them to substitute away from a particular hotel in favor of another. In this environment, hotels are pressed to do everything they can to ensure that each traveler’s experience is positive and memorable. Corporate travelers are a particularly attractive source of repeat business and much sought after by hotels.
In order to secure the maximum number of corporate stays, Dwornik doesn’t simply wait for large corporations to come looking for accommodation – he proactively looks for them. “Prospecting probably has the single biggest impact in terms of growing our business using Maximizer. By leveraging local contacts and networks, we can get some advanced knowledge of say, a large construction project that is planned for the city. Then, I can build out a list of contacts and influencers who are associated with the construction firms doing the work. In the months prior to the project’s ground breaking, I can target those contacts with email messages containing relationship-building city information, maps and other details they might find valuable in their planning. By the time the project is underway, the Best Western Heidelberg Inn is right on the top of their list of accommodations when selecting lodgings for the firm’s employees arriving in the city. Being able to track these correspondences and understand associations between various seemingly disconnected groups of people is a major advantage in the market.”
According to Dwornik, “the best way of reaching out and contacting corporate travelers including construction firms, federal employees, oil and gas pipeline operators is via email.” Before Maximizer, The Best Western Heidelberg Inn relied heavily on direct mail through Canada Post to stay in touch with past travelers and, in some rare cases, prospect for new corporate customers. This posed several challenges. Typically, the hotel would only have addresses for the company headquarters – missing the opportunity to correspond directly with travelers. Sending marketing materials via direct mail is also an expensive means of communicating – particularly when the message is tailored to each individual mail recipient. As a result, prospecting was not as effective as it could be. “The fact that virtually all corporate travelers are linked to an email address gives us access to a much larger group of travelers to market to. And there’s no doubt that email costs a fraction of regular direct mail. The answer for us was to harness personalized email.”
The Maximizer Solution
With these requirements in mind, Dwornik took advantage of his previous experience with Maximizer and began to use the system as his primary business development tool. Today, the Best Western Heidelberg Inn is proactively searching for profitable groups of travelers – rather than waiting for travelers to find the hotel.
Using Maximizer, Dwornik has developed a sophisticated system for approaching prospective hotel guests and increasing the chances that they will select the Best Western Heidelberg Inn for their stay. Now, when a sports team or construction firm will be visiting Lethbridge, Dwornik is ready with detailed Maximizer profiles of prospective hotel guests. Details of past stays, phone conversations, responses to previous email messages – even special events like birthdays are captured in the system to further tailor future interactions. “Being able to segment prospective hotel guests and past guests according to their preferences such as attending annual festivals or sporting events allows me to create highly-personalized email campaigns. Without spending money on postage or a direct mail house, I can send out email messages with highly relevant local content like street directions, restaurant suggestions, locations of attractions they might enjoy based on their profile. This leaves guests with the sense that we genuinely care about making their trip as enjoyable as possible,” says Dwornik.
While spending time on the road, Dwornik uses Maximizer’s MaxLink for Palm devices. “I have the system set to automatically send an email confirming my appointments – a great feature for when you’re on the road or doing a lot of calling from the office.” Using his Palm, he is able to take his customer information such as phone and email, driving directions, to-do items and calendar appointments on the road with him. And, he is able to keep track of conversations with companies and sports teams in his Maximizer database – entering notes to ensure that key details aren’t lost. “I can’t even imagine how many times having Maximizer on my Palm has helped me out when traveling. If I’m running late for an appointment I can simply access the right phone number on my Palm, call my contact and let them know I’m on my way. Cellular phones can handle a few hundred phone numbers but my Maximizer can keep track of tens of thousands of customers.”
Even Dwornik’s phone system is tied to Maximizer. Using TAPI integration to the Best Western Heidelberg Inn’s phone system Dwornik can dial a prospective guest right out of the traveler’s profile in Maximizer. With the traveler’s entire history with the hotel right at hand, Dwornik is in a much better position to provide fast, intelligent and highly relevant service. And, using the Maximizer phone log, he can quickly report on his prospecting efforts.
“I use Maximizer as the dashboard for virtually all of my business development activities. I use it for all my email correspondence, drafting letters based on templates, logging details of phone calls and interactions with travelers while on the road using my Palm. I even use Maximizer at home to keep tabs on friends and business associates. Based on the very reasonable cost of Maximizer, the return I’ve achieved on my investment is very very impressive.”
Next Steps
The next step in the expanding use of Maximizer at The Best Western Heidelberg Inn will see Dwornik upgrading to the latest generation of the system and using Maximizer’s Opportunity Manager to further sharpen his best practices around staying on top of The Best Western Heidelberg Inn’s prospect base. “With my Maximizer firing on all cylinders, I’m at the point where I can afford to experiment with different sales strategies and techniques. I think that adding the workflow of the Opportunity Manager and pipeline tracking to my everyday sales activities will help me take my business development efforts to the next level.”
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