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PortoBay boosts guest satisfaction and secures more direct bookings

Hotel chain digitalises loyalty programme and uses customer data to tailor offers and incentives

 
 

Summary

PortoBay increased its percentage of direct bookings to 27%, boosting profits. This is partly down to scaling up its loyalty programme, which runs on the Einstein 1 platform, and gives the Group more opportunities to turn customer data into increasingly personalised communication with guests.

About the Company

PortoBay Group runs a chain of 16 four-to-five-star hotels across Portugal and Brazil. Its hotels are known for their great quality and service. Consistently high guest loyalty and satisfaction rates drive superior results in the majority of the group’s destinations.

The Challenge

Without a central CRM and marketing platform, building stronger relationships with guests was difficult.

PortoBay wanted to boost direct bookings and guest loyalty by improving the customer experience across all booking channels. Its strategy was to refine processes, collect guest data, and deliver personalised content throughout the customer journey, and it needed a centralised CRM and marketing platform to achieve this.

Manually calculating tiers for loyalty customers was slow and unscalable.

Customers have the option of signing up to PortoBay’s loyalty programme, Prestige. In exchange for their contact details, they earn experience points to move through a four-tiered membership programme. Prestige is a vital part of the strategy to enhance guest engagement with the brand, attract more direct bookings, boost cross-selling, and reduce seasonal lulls. But it was mainly run manually and faced challenges around scalability and team productivity.

Siloed data couldn’t be accessed easily to personalise the guest experience.

PortoBay also has a long-term vision to tap into customer data to personalise their experience with recommendations that match their interests – for example, a day at the spa or plant-based menus for vegans – but data was spread across multiple systems or not digitalised at all. To start working on this goal, the Group needed to centralise and consolidate this data.

How Salesforce Helps

Centralising CRM, marketing, and bookings on the Einstein 1 platform.

PortoBay partnered with FullSix to implement the Einstein 1 platform and connect the booking system, website, and customer-facing loyalty app for 360-degree visibility. The Group used Trailhead to upskill its staff and trained a dedicated data quality expert to support the marketing team.

Building a loyalty management engine to underpin the customer relationship.

PortoBay uses Service Cloud as its CRM and built a custom loyalty engine on top. Customers sign up via an online portal or app and can view or amend their own data. This gives PortoBay much higher quality data than it had previously and combines with data in the Einstein 1 platform to create a guest profile.

Experience points are automatically calculated based on stays spent at a PortoBay hotel. When a guest has enough points, they progress to the next tier with no manual intervention, saving time for the team to develop other strategies to enhance the guest experience.

Currently, guests use the app to view personal data in Service Cloud and their membership level. In the future, more functionalities will be launched to optimise the guest experience, specifically focusing on during stay experience, upsell, and cross-sell.

By enticing customers to sign up to Prestige for a 10% discount on their first booking, PortoBay has been able to attract more new customers who book directly with the brand.

Automating Prestige emails with Marketing Cloud and unlocking 70% open rates.

A big win for PortoBay was how it evolved its loyalty programme with Einstein 1. Marketing Cloud is used to run campaigns such as personalised Prestige emails. Customers receive emails created in Journey Builder that are tailored based on membership level and check-in or check-out dates. This is a very engaged audience, and emails achieve around 70% open rates and 12% click-through rates.

Staying in touch with 200,000 contacts all year round.

PortoBay sends 2.8 million emails every year and around 80 campaigns driving up engagement and loyalty. These go to more than 200,000 prospects and receive 38% open rates. The marketing team uses Einstein Send Time Optimisation to boost engagement rates and real-time data to plan when to send new content.

In the future, the team intends to create a segment based in a region they know is experiencing wet weather, tempting them to make a booking with sunlit imagery or a livestream of the beautiful Algarve.

The Group has finished migrating transactional emails to Marketing Cloud and plans to tap into Einstein 1 data to improve the guests’ stay while they’re on site. For example, identifying if a customer has booked breakfast and emailing them to suggest they also book lunch or dinner, rather than sending mass reminders to all guests to book breakfast.

Keeping customer satisfaction well above industry average with a 76% Net Promoter Score.

Customers love staying at PortoBay Hotels and Resorts. The average Net Promoter Score is 16 percentage points higher than industry average, and Einstein 1 is helping the Group to retain this competitive edge and achieve the group loyalty indicators.

As well as offering guests more value via its app, PortoBay has started expanding the use of Service Cloud and replacing its previous ticketing system to reach omnichannel and boost productivity. The central reservation team was the first to migrate to Service Cloud, and with a more complete guest profile in front of them, they can further personalise customer service and offers.

 

“We’re confident that the Einstein 1 platform will help us to create moments and experiences that matter for our guests. We can increase engagement and upsell revenue, and our processes are more efficient.”

Fabíola Câmara Pereira, Board Member and Marketing Director, PortoBay Group

The Salesforce Difference

PortoBay Group already has a reputation for excellence. As it brings CRM and data onto one, trusted platform, it can use insights on customers to create moments that matter – and nothing is more important on holiday than making the right kind of memories.

The hospitality industry is manual by design. Einstein 1 connects the systems behind the guest experience and because it’s easy to customise, PortoBay Group can automate actions that were previously done by hand. This, combined with the future promise of AI, empowers hotel staff to give guests more personalised, relevant services.

The Results

 
 

27%

direct
bookings

 
 

70%

Average
email open rate

 

2.8

million marketing emails sent per year

 

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