Last month I was fortunate enough to be invited along to the 2014 Wyndham Hotel Group EMEA Summit in Berlin, where I met with Rui Barros, Wyndham Area SVP & managing director for the Europe, Middle East& Africa region and Bani Haddad, Wyndham’s Dubai-based regional VP, along with a number of Wyndham GMs and DOSMs from across the region.
One thing that struck me was Barros’ emphasis on the Wyndham Rewards scheme. He even joked to me that he wished he had set a competition at the start of the two-day event to get delegates to guess how many times he’d uttered the word “rewards”.
Of course, this was the key message he was looking to drive home to staff in the EMEA region, and it worked. At the event wrap-up he stood on stage and asked: “What is the one thing you’ll take away from this event?”
Excited by the response he received, Barros told me: “It was so cool during the wrap-up that the rewards came up!”
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His main reasoning for pushing the rewards programme he said, was that in an organisation like Wyndham that has such a focus on franchised businesses, the one thing the company can try to influence is distribution costs.
Driving loyalty, Barros said, can drive distribution costs down to 5% as opposed to 25-30%. Additionally, with most hotel brands having as part of their rewards scheme the condition that guests must book on their brand.com site, rewards schemes also drive direct bookings.
In fact, Wyndham saw direct revenue for online bookings grow 346% from the UAE and 187% from Saudi Arabia last year compared to 2012, the year Wyndham Rewards was rolled out in the Middle East.
And reeling in members is surely getting easier now that those consumers that used to reserve their loyalty for airlines have cottoned on to the fact that hotel rewards schemes are no longer just about free room upgrades.
There are gift certificates to be had, concert and event tickets. In fact, Starwood reported that one guest bid 300,000 Starwood Starpoints to get courtside seats at the 2013 US Open. And then there are the airline tickets – a real draw in this region with hotels now partnering with often pricey flight companies such as Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways.
Additionally, the status-focused nature of rewards schemes is very reflective of a large demographic of our visitors, who come here for the glitz-and-glam of Dubai, or the laid-back luxury of Qatar.
With schemes such as Fairmont’s Presidents Club, Hyatt Gold Passport, Hilton HHonours, and Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG), it’s a wonder companies have taken so long to roll out their global programmes here.
While Wyndham Rewards has been around for ten years, the group only brought the scheme to the Middle East two years ago, and according to Bani Haddad, it has “taken off tremendously” – particularly with Saudi visitors, who he described as “very rewards-savvy”.
Haddad said the company is enrolling “thousands, literally thousands every month” into the scheme, especially with partners Saudi Arabian Airlines, Turkish Airlines and Qatar Airways continually adding more and more benefits.
The global target for Wyndham is to reach 10 million Wyndham Rewards members, from the 8.8 million currently active today. Having seen enrollment increase 97% year over year in 2013, this target almost seems modest.
However now Barros’s focus will shift he admits, from championing the scheme, to overseeing investments in data capture that back up this burgeoning loyalty with seamlessly integrated reservations, property management and customer relationship CRM systems.
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