Goals: Clearly state your marketing goals. What did you strive to achieve using this piece or program?Background: GHA DISCOVERY is a challenger loyalty program designed to help the independent hotel brands of Global Hotel Alliance (GHA) compete with the big chains, bringing together 40 brands with 800 hotels in 100 countries. It launched in 2010 as the first programme dedicated to experiential travel. In 2019, several external and internal factors made it clear that the programme needed to significantly change in order to stay relevant, so we underwent a transformation project – called DISCOVERY 2.0 – that spanned customer research, business modeling, shareholder funding rounds, approvals across hundreds of C-level stakeholders across our brands, and finally confirmation to redesign the program. We designed a new value proposition that would appeal to customers, drive engagement and profitable revenue to our hotels, help our brands compete, and drive fees to reinvest. After a tumultuous 2 years of development during the pandemic, we successfully relaunched on December 7th, 2021! With little budget we had to generate awareness and customer engagement in the new program, which we did through Email Marketing, Social Media, PR, and hotel collateral both at the GHA level and through our hotel brands, which we provided assets and direction to. We began launch communications in October with most launch activities being in December. Goals: Our objective for our launch communications was to drive awareness for the new program and its new value proposition. Our goals were based on impressions, with an overall goal of 5M impressions across all trackable channels (email, social, PR). With increased awareness and member engagement in our programme, the goals included increasing enrolments, increasing reward redemption, increasing cross-brand stays and increasing profitable revenue. Our global effort was viewed as a huge success by our board and stakeholders across our brands.

Results: Which of your original goals did you achieve and how? How did you measure the effectiveness of the piece or campaign? Entrants should provide quantifiable results of their tactics or campaigns. (for example, click through rates or ad equivalency)We doubled our goal of 5M impressions and exceeded our expectations for reach and driving awareness of our new program. -For emails, we achieved 8.9M opens and 443K clicks, just from GHA email marketing alone (Brands emailed as well but obtaining stats was difficult, so only our trackable figures are included in our results). - For social, we achieved 186K impressions and 2.7K likes. - For PR, we achieved 495 media mentions, 251M news reach across our top markets, and US$2.33M in advertising value equivalent. Programme Results post-launch (CONFIDENTIAL): - Increase enrolments (members are interested in the new value proposition and staff is engaged and encouraging members to join): +20% YOY! - Increase member engagement, measured by Reward Redemption: +59% YOY (the average ultimate redemption rate is 27%), with D$ redemption driving the desired behaviors, such as reactivating inactive members, encouraging stays (and +175% longer), driving cross-brand (60% of D$ redemptions are on a cross-brand stay), and even increasing future bookings after redemption. - Increase cross-brand stays: increased from 6% of total revenue in the previous programme to now 11% of total revenue (nearly doubled!). - Increase profitable revenue: with 9 months of operation underway, we are seeing the best financials in our program history (the business model is working!) and the new programme is addressing the business challenges we were trying to tackle: all member metrics are significantly higher (ADR, ALOS, repeat rate, cross-brand stays), leading to an average 17x ROI bottom-line for our hotels (a 21% lift to the previous programme).

Budget: Please include total budget vs. total actual cost. How much revenue has the piece or campaign generated and how does this compare to your goal? What was the return on investment?We had zero additional budget for this launch communications campaign. We leveraged the existing teams (digital, CRM, creative, and our brands) and our existing tools (Adobe Creative Suite, Responsys, Meltwater PR tracking) to implement the email, social and PR activities. Based on the significant exposure that was generated, this launch campaign was seen as hugely successful in terms of ROI.

Objective(s): What problems did the sales, marketing & guest satisfaction, or revenue optimization technology aim to solve?

Innovative use of technology: The extent to which new directions are charted or old challenges are resolved by using the technology in a new way.

Implementation & creativity: How was the technology implemented so that it was easy to use, solved a manpower problem, streamlined a function, or fueled recovery?

Results & Evaluation: How did the technology move the department or business forward to achieve goals, revenue or otherwise?

Goal: How did you demonstrate that you are committed to advancing diversity in your organization through your marketing?

Initiatives: Describe the promotion. What was your organization’s message and how does it foster diversity? How was the target audience channel developed/pursued?

Results: Please describe how your organization was purposeful in advancing diversity through this initiative. Please describe the metrics you used to judge success. What were the forecasted and actual outcomes described in your Key Performance Indicators (KPI)? What impact did the initiative have on your organization and for your customers?

Entry TitleGHA DISCOVERY Relaunch

DivisionIntegrated Campaign - Business to Consumer

CategoryIntegrated Campaign