Hotel Direct Booking Efforts Create Lasting Loyalty: New Report

In 2017, a report from Kalibri Labs suggested that the massive direct booking pushes launched a year earlier by the major hotel companies — Hilton, Marriott, InterContinental Hotels Group, and Hyatt among them —actually worked. And today, more than two years later, a new report from Kalibri suggests that not only did the campaigns work, but those campaigns — many of which included discounted room rates — generated loyal customers and guests. "Some people were sure [consumers] just signed up [for the hotel loyalty programs] to get discounts and that those members may have dropped off," Kalibri Labs CEO and co-founder Cindy Estis-Green said. "We didn't track data by numbers of personally identifying information because of security, but the loyalty numbers keep going up. Fifty percent and growing is now the average when it comes to contribution to occupancy from brand.com channels." Kalibri evaluates and predicts hotel revenue performance. Examining hotel stays that took place from January 2016 to August 2018, Kalibri's research looked at a total of 19,000 hotels that had loyalty programs, ranging from economy to luxury properties throughout the U.S., and representing a total of 80 million different transactions. "What the second study has borne out is that the new loyalty members