Luxury Hotel Revenue Growth - Gift Card & Voucher Sales - Case Study

The Set Hotels Digital Revenue Growth

Introduction

Founded in 2011, The Set Hotels is a collection of modern grand hotels located in distinguished addresses in the finest cities across the world. Hotel Café Royal in London, Lutetia in Paris and Conservatorium in Amsterdam.

The Set Hotel Group properties are iconic, grand, and stunning on every level, and attention to detail comes as standard in their pursuit of excellence. The Set Hotel Group brand has become synonymous with luxury, sophistication, and style. They have built a reputation for the very highest standards of service and product.

In late 2018 The Set Hotels management team embarked upon a project to evaluate and procure the services of a new voucher technology provider to replace their legacy system whilst maximising pre-paid online sales of their product and service offerings across the group including Accommodation, Fine Dining, Spa, and Leisure services.

The Set Hotels team additionally required their voucher management facility to support multiple languages and currencies, offer easy issuance, tracking, and audit of complementary and charity vouchers both at Group and individual hotel level whilst being able to control and administrate system access and usage permissions with a high degree of resolution for key staff members across all hotel locations.

A further improvement identified in the replacement of their legacy gift card technology was the need for clarity in reporting. Specifically, emphasis was placed upon sales reports, voucher tracking and financial reporting to provide the Finance team with a real-time audit of all vouchers redeemed, unredeemed, and expired with clear data on the value of all unredeemed vouchers in circulation at any given time.

Appointment

After a period researching technology providers in the gift card and voucher technology space, VoucherCart was appointed in 2019 to deliver a voucher solution for The Set Hotels.

Brian Gore, Vice President of Brand, Marketing & Digital for The Set Hotels stated:

“Working with VoucherCart was a clear decision for us. Their experience, technology and levels of support placed them well ahead of competing solutions. The system is powerful and flexible, allowing us to promote and sell across all of our services. The support we receive directly to our hotel staff across our varying departments is excellent, and as a luxury service provider this is paramount.”

Strategy and implementation

VoucherCart provided The Set Hotels with a flexible set of eCommerce sales features not supported under their legacy technology platform. This enabled them to sell widely across their products/services as well as package their products/services to be sold in ways that were not previously possible.

As part of the onboarding process, the team was able to look at all products/services sold over the counter, by telephone or which were saleable via booking, and voucherise these. The result is that The Set Hotels can now take payment in advance for their offerings where previously no option existed for buyers to do so with VoucherCart’s intuitive and personalised eCommerce self-checkout.

In VoucherCart every voucher, gift card, membership, or ticket has its own unique terms of use for the buyer and vouchers can be configured to support multiple options for the buyer with varying price points for each.

A guest visit to the Hotel Café Royal, London, Lutetia in Paris, or the Conservatorium Amsterdam is an experience to be remembered and where memories are created. Accordingly, the strategy for The Set Hotels team with support from their VoucherCart Account Manager was to provide a seamless and personalised buyer experience allowing guests to browse and purchase across a range of accommodation, spa, and dining experiences as well as traditional gift vouchers.

View Live Examples:

https://hotel-cafe-royal.vouchercart.com/app/
https://hotellutetia.vouchercart.com/app/
https://conservatorium-hotel.vouchercart.com/app/

Benefits and Advantages

The VoucherCart platform provides all technology required for businesses to create, promote, sell, redeem, manage, and report upon voucher, gift card, membership, and ticket sales for both digital and physical cards. All tools are available to users from one login and businesses can take payment on their sales directly via a range of the world’s leading and most widely used Payment Gateways. Third-party software connectivity is supported via VoucherCart’s full-featured REST API

Advances in technology have seen pre-paid sales of monetary and experience-based vouchers and gift cards positioned as a priority revenue channel for businesses. Vouchers and gift cards have become a business discipline of focus like no other in recent years, due to the fact that voucher sales deliver the highest profit businesses can achieve. Besides offering payment in full, and in advance for products and services which are only ever redeemed on average 85% of the time, they additionally drive new customer acquisition thanks to the “gifting” principle of the sale.

In addition to this, The Set Hotels have peace of mind going forward, and security in the knowledge that the tools available to them on a daily basis are up to date and at the forefront of eCommerce technology.

As a global platform, VoucherCart is 100% cloud-based and all system upgrades and new feature releases come completely free of charge with no hidden costs.

Results

“Revenue results since implementation have been strong with growth rates as high as 250% in certain areas of the business. The VoucherCart platform is used by various members of the team from finance to marketing and sales across all hotels in the group, and feedback from the team on system features, ease of use, and support levels provided have been excellent. Initial training was very thorough and the VoucherCart support team is on hand via instant chat whenever we need them.”

Brian Gore, Vice President of Brand, Marketing & Digital for The Set Hotels

Sales stats showed that although The Set Hotels were able to drive revenue growth through Monetary Gift Voucher sales, their Experience Vouchers were showing comparatively higher revenue and growth. This has placed a focus on best-selling voucher types and offering a wider choice for customers to purchase. We were also conscious that we wanted everyone to be able to experience what The Set Hotels offer, so we created vouchers based on various price points, from a delightful Afternoon Tea to a Luxury Stay with Spa Treatments.

The Set Hotels team also decided to embark upon selling tickets to their various workshops & events that were held in 2019. This meant peace of mind as the system processes everything for the buyer and sends the ticket for the event, whilst all tickets were 100% paid for in advance. All the hotel teams need do is redeem the tickets when presented by holders on the day of the actual event.

As an exclusive group, The Set Hotels strategy is not to offer “discount” in the traditional sense, however, they do offer added value at certain times of the year. In 2019 their Black Friday campaign again brought added sales revenue across all 3 hotels. During COVID the value-added voucher offers have proved invaluable for revenue during the lockdown.

Future

At VoucherCart we see continual development of our platform, informed by the needs of our valued clients such as the Set Hotels as the means to ensure we maintain our position as the worlds leading voucher sales technology provider. New feature releases on the VoucherCart platform are available to all our clients and are completely free of charge.

New developments in 2020 include:

• New technology and strategic partnerships with leading industry organisations such as Facebook, EPOSNow, MEWS, and many more.
• New payment gateway integrations.
• Rapid on-boarding: Sign-up and go-live the same day with our new interface to allow cloning of vouchers, gift cards, memberships and tickets specific to your business sector.
• Reloadable cards with tailored customer retention controls and push-rewards.
• Enhanced email promotion tools.
• New and enhanced sales page designer UX.
• Extended controls in voucher designer.

For more information on the VoucherCart platform please contact [email protected]