
PortoBay boosts guest satisfaction and secures more direct bookings
Hotel chain digitalises loyalty programme and uses customer data to tailor offers and incentives
Summary
About the Company
The Challenge
Without a central CRM and marketing platform, building stronger relationships with guests was difficult.
Manually calculating tiers for loyalty customers was slow and unscalable.
Siloed data couldn’t be accessed easily to personalise the guest experience.
How Salesforce Helps
Centralising CRM, marketing, and bookings on the Einstein 1 platform.
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.
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.”
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
Ready to build a single view of your customer?

More Resources

Guide
8 Sales Productivity Pitfalls (and Steps to Avoid Them)

Solution
Sales Team Productivity

Report
Connected Customer Report
Do you have questions? We help you on your way.
Ask about our products, prices, implementation or anything else. Our experts are ready for you.
Questions? Call us at +353 14403500
