Running the numbers
Understanding its members then, is one of the main challenges for any hotel loyalty scheme. However, according to Rotana loyalty programme director Elie Saliba, there is still “the challenge of running a reward programme flexible enough to be able to satisfy all of your individual member’s needs”.
“Guest expectation, especially somewhere here like the Middle East, is very high, and with our Rotana Rewards programme, that expectation is even higher,” says Saliba.
The Rotana Rewards scheme is split into three separates systems, two for private guests and a ‘Classic’ card for corporate guests.
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Of the two private loyalty cards, one is the entry level ‘Select’ card, that gives users benefits such as late checkout as well as earning the user points for every dirham spent at Rotana hotels. However, the second card, the ‘Exclusive’, is a paid for membership card that gives the member discounts on F&B as well as off best available room rates.
“At Rotana we have 17,000 Exclusive members,” explains Saliba, “with a further 25,000 Select members on file and 800,000 total profiles within the Rotana system.”
While Rotana guests are thus able to benefit from a long list of potential benefits, the main benefit for Rotana is the sheer amount of personalised data they are able to collect across all three systems.
“These kind of strong numbers within the database are a great benefit to us, and using this data we have been able to achieve a great response to our specially targeted promotional offers, delivering a 2% response rate to date that we are very happy with,” reveals Saliba.
In 2005, Rotana made the decision to move its loyalty scheme operations in-house, having originally outsourced the programme since its inception in 1999. It was a move that maximised the group’s ability to use guest information from the loyalty programme in more effective ways.
“The main reason for taking the loyalty programme in house was purely to improve customer service. When a third party runs a loyalty programme then their main focus will be to make money from selling the scheme, but our main objective was always to ensure we had a satisfied customer.
Being in direct contact with guests is also vital, with our members regularly receiving selected surveys, emails and letters to ensure there is regular communication and in order to listen to our member’s feedback,” adds Saliba.
“Now we are able to tell that, while our typical guests are spread across the leisure and business markets, 60% of our loyalty card members are business customers, while our Select and Exclusive loyalty card members generate 35% of all guest revenue across the whole company,” says Saliba.
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