Marketing and Online Distribution at Radisson Hotel Group

What are some of the major challenges and trends that have been impacting the MarTech space lately?

In today’s world, where each of us is constantly digitally connected, capturing the attention of a potential customer is key. Content on our digital platforms must load almost instantaneously and must foremost be relevant and interactive as well as trustworthy and appealing.

At Radisson Hotel Group, we put a lot of effort into engaging with our customers with tailored experiences. Our customers are all different. Some are staying at our hotels for the first time, while most are loyal customers who love our hospitality and are recurring guests. Treating them all the same way is not valuable either to them or to our business.

We spent the last couple of years preparing our digital transformation to ensure that our website and app moved away from offering the same experience for all in favor of a targeted and personalized experience. Our journey of providing personalized services has taken various steps, and we are progressing steadily with our roadmap to achieve one-to-one personalized experiences.

In addition, the digital landscape has changed, and we have seen how people’s habits have changed rapidly. People research and explore more while staying home. Before making a booking, they want to know more details about our hotels, our rooms, and our facilities. This is why we have been working on the creation of digital, immersive experiences which allows us to showcase our hotels in a new way so people can feel and live the spaces.

Creating personalization, however, requires a lot of effort and our teams need to create many more assets. While before a curated selection of images sufficed, we now need multiple fresh, top-quality images to highlight the different personalization experiences we offer for target groups. This requires the need for content automation processes to ensure that our teams can manage multiple assets across different channels in the most time-budget efficient way.

We remain strong advocates of immersive experiences, and a 360 tour sometimes takes days to capture. In addition, you must also ensure that the quality of your assets is of the best quality and helps your conversion goals.

What keeps you up at night when it comes to some of the major predicaments in the MarTech space?

The different systems, the amount of data, the breadth of channels that we manage, and the rapidly changing environments and regulations, make it sometimes very challenging for our teams.

“Customers love immersive content because it gives them the opportunity to see exactly what they will get in an easy, interactive, and fun way.”

In the hotel industry, we deal with a very high volume of data. We have online data collected through our digital channels and data collected on the property by our colleagues. Our teams need to orchestrate many systems to make sure they are in sync and that the flow of information is correct.

When dealing with customers’ data, we must pay extra care to manage personal information and ensure secured and protected environments. We want our customers to feel safe and ensure we offer the best services thanks to the behavioral data we have collected.

Our teams must be strategic and make the right decisions about which data to use and for which purpose. There is a lot of work that needs to be done to connect all the dots in a global infrastructure.

Can you tell us about the latest project that you have been working on and what are some of the technological and process elements that you leveraged to make the project successful?

One of our main missions at Radisson Hotel Group is to provide memorable experiences to our guests. This goes beyond the service at our hotels. Our guest journey starts with an online booking on our website or app. To ensure even this stage is a memorable experience, we engage with our visitors using the most relevant and personalized content on our digital platforms.

We are very proud of our online personalized experiences journey. We started with basic personalized experiences based on geo-localization which provided content based on regional breakdowns, and then filtered this further by country, and lastly via city-specific audiences when necessary.

Geo-localized content was just the start because even by identifying and targeting a specific geographical group, you could still have different customer types. The needs of our guests are completely different if they are traveling for leisure or business, with kids or alone, for example. As a result, we started leveraging our member's database, identifying common paths, and creating our own customer matrix with the aim to build what we call our customer DNA. By knowing what our guests like, their behavior patterns, and what they expect from us, we can provide the best online content suiting their needs on all our digital channels.

Which are some of the technological trends which excite you for the future of the MarTech space?

We are extremely excited by the web 3.0 revolution. Metaverse, NFTs, and VR are opening new opportunities to create more sophisticated content experiences. Even if these technologies are not yet widely spread, consumers are being encouraged to use and interact with these new forms of media.

 As innovators, we have been investing in immersive content experiences. Our web visitors can virtually walk into our hotels and explore the spaces thanks to 3D virtual venue tours from their phones, computers, or VR devices. Visitors can move around our hotels, explore the rooms, see what the view from the room looks like, and even interact with surrounding objects. They can then book that specific place on their screen.

We have also integrated immersive content in our meetings and events areas. This is an incredible help for meeting planners who are looking for a venue for their event. Organizers can explore the meeting rooms and the different set-ups and book that specific space directly on our website.

 Customers love immersive content because it gives them the opportunity to see exactly what they will get in an easy, interactive, and fun way. The first data we collected shows that immersive content increases engagement with our products and time spent on our website. It generates more inquiries and finally more conversions.

We look at immersive experiences from a different angle. If someone has used our 3D virtual navigation, they have in essence been already inside our hotels. They have experienced our hotel and its facilities, albeit only virtually. Most likely, if they do not choose us this time, they will bear in mind their experience and consider us next time.