Hyatt Puts Out the “Big Welcome” Mat for Loyalty Members

How do you promote a lodging loyalty program when businesses are slashing travel and consumers are perfecting the stay-cation? Chief Marketer spoke to John Wallis, CMO of Hyatt, and to Amy Curtis-McIntyre, senior vice president of brand communications, about the biggest promotion in the hotel chain’s history, “The Big Welcome”, offering a year of free lodging and a million air miles to Gold Passport loyalty members on three continents. Applicants were asked to write short essays about what they’d do with a year of free Hyatt stays. A winner was slated to be chosen from each region by mid-June. (A shorter version of this Q&A appears in the June/July issue of Chief Marketer magazine.)

Chief Marketer: What’s the strategy behind the “Big Welcome” contest?
John Wallis: With this campaign, we’re trying to concentrate on three areas: customer satisfaction, loyalty, and employee engagement. If we can strike on all three, we can gain market share during this period. The Big Welcome is not only marketing to our customers, but something we can market internally, to increase the importance of our customers in the eyes of our front-line staff.

CM: How has the lodging industry changed with the economy, and how has your marketing been affected?
JW: we have about 16 resort properties total, and yes, these resorts have suffered along with everybody during the downturn. But our focus has been more [on business travelers, since] the customer that spends business travel time with us is often the one who stays in our resorts as well. Therefore we wanted to show ever-increasing loyalty to them.

The customer that’s traveling today isn’t the one who was traveling in 2008. Basically corporate America stopped traveling on Sept. 16 of last year. We’ve been concentrating on customers who’ve traveled since then, because that means they have a job and a budget.

CM: Have you used price promotions as well as loyalty programs to build business?
Amy Curtis-McIntyre; This is an economy unlike any other, and in order to get business, you have to be out there in a multi-layered approach. We’ve become more aggressive in our pricing in some places. In others we’ve used Gold Passport bonus points. We’ve tried new advertising venues and stepped up our publicity efforts. Overall it’s been a matter of increasing the distribution of information. But this [the Big Welcome loyalty promotion] was a bigger focus for a longer period of time than our other initiatives.

CM: What kind of results have you gotten from the Big Welcome so far?
JW: We’ve had 87,354 essays submitted. In addition, 197,541 people have entered the sweepstakes for a free one-night stay. Even better, 79% of those entries said they had stayed with the competition. And many gave us the chance to communicate with them through e-mail.
ACM: We’ve attracted an extremely high demographic of people that really love travel, as opposed to contest addicts. Responses to questions about other [travel] programs entrants were enrolled in skewed even higher than we’d hoped.

CM: How complicated is it to operate a global promotion of this size?
ACM: You have no idea. The IT requirements, the logistics, the language translations, the legal complications involved with giving out prizes in some countries, the citizenship requirements…
JW: I was about to say it was quite simple.
ACM: (Laughing) Well, when we launched, you was asleep in Hong Kong.

CM: Any other recent moves to increase customer loyalty?
JW: [In early May] we launched Hyatt Concierge on Twitter, a tool we’re using to drive customer loyalty by managing their questions. In that time we’ve added more than 1,200 followers. And you’ll see that they are all absolutely over the moon that this is the way we’re using Twitter. Someone staying at the Park Hyatt Milan was just asking for a good sushi restaurant, and within 18 minutes they had the answer. A lot of requests like that have come through, and this is exactly what we wanted to use Twitter for. We’re excited by the initial response.