INNSIGHT DROVE OVER $250K IN REVENUE IN 2022 FOR
STAGE COACH LODGE: HERE'S HOW!
Today, Stage Coach Lodge is TripAdvisor's #1 Ranked Hotel in Monterey. This property offers clean, comfortable, renovated, air-conditioned hotel rooms and a hospitable staff that focuses on guest satisfaction. It offers guest rooms and suites with amenities that include 42" TVs, microwaves, fridges, coffee makers, irons, free Wi-Fi, and full bathrooms with high-quality toiletries.
Overview
This 26-unit boutique hotel in Monterey is located near Downtown Monterey and just minutes from Carmel-by-The-Sea. The area's top attractions are Fisherman's Wharf, Pacific Grove, Cannery Row, Monterey Bay Aquarium, and more.
With an ultra-competitive lodging market and economic headwinds due to covid, the owners of Stage Coach Lodge tasked INNsight with helping differentiate the lodge and have it stand out from the competition, drive more direct traffic, and expand margins by providing the lowest cost channel to capture market share.
Challenges
- The Monterey lodging market is highly competitive, with thousands of hotel rooms spread across different property types and classes, from luxury hotels on Cannery Row to limited service and budget motels on two ‘motel strips’ of Munras and Fremont Avenues. The highly competitive landscape puts immense pressure on rates, with many hotels racing to the bottom.
Even when guests had a wonderful time, they still added reviews about what went wrong during their stay. More honest reviews that described the hotel, its positive attributes, and the hospitable service were essential to set the hotel apart from the competition and noise in a crowded market.
In addition, Stage Coach Lodge sought to improve the hotel’s online reputation, which was traditionally in the middle of the pack on sites like TripAdvisor. When INNsight started its reputation management service at Stage Coach Lodge, the hotel ranked a dismal 56th place in the market on TripAdvisor.
- Despite providing a great product in an ideal location with first-rate hospitality, the hotel’s margins were eroded by costly Online Travel Agent commissions and an extremely competitive market that uses expensive OTA promotions and drives rates below cost. As a result, it was necessary to be more present online to convert website visitors into paying guests.
An SEO-optimized website was necessary for Stage Coach Lodge to improve their customer experience. Instead of relying on OTAs, they wanted a more robust website for direct online bookings. Websites that are poorly optimized, faster, and display basic or repetitive content rarely generate profits.
Hence, the owners sought INNsight’s help to create compelling content and build more traffic by posting regularly on the hotel’s social media sites. These efforts were crucial in increasing customer satisfaction and the effectiveness of marketing.
Approach
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Online Reputation Management (ORM):
It was vital to maintain and improve the hotel's online reputation. The hotel needed to promptly address and respond to online reviews to establish a superior reputation over its competitors.
INNsight managed and tracked Stage Coach Lodge's online reputation using its proprietary Keen™, the industry's most effective Reputation Management System. The Keen™ software ensured that Stage Coach Lodge was offering an improved customer experience, which led to more positive reviews, a higher ranking on search engines, and an increased conversion rate.
By obtaining a plethora of data, they could deeply understand the customer experience and use this knowledge to their advantage to improve their services wherever possible.
INNsight helped drive more positive online reviews through its review solicitation system that disintermediated negative reviews to handle offline and promoted positive reviews to be posted publicly.
Quick and unique responses were critical factors in building a solid branding strategy. INNsight is here to provide hotels with the software to help improve the guest experience while also allowing them to protect their online reputation.
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Building a Robust Website:
With the help of years of experience in website design, INNsight understood where the Stage Coach Lodge website needed improvement. The website required a revamp with attention to detail and new and improved content.
Using the latest technologies and proven practices, INNsight worked with Stage Coach Lodge to produce a custom-designed website that drove higher user engagement and conversion rates.
The SEO Team built this comprehensive website with custom videography, search-engine-optimized copy, and professional photography. In addition, user-friendly content was consistently posted on the hotel's website that was fully responsive on desktops, tablets, and mobile phones.
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Pay-Per-Click:
INNsight's team of experts investigated the hotel's current digital standing. Regarding ad spending, we intend to be wise, and our team of experts has the necessary knowledge to increase direct bookings quickly.
Implementing pay-per-click advertisements was crucial in achieving a profitable and successful outcome. It allowed Stage Coach Lodge to penetrate mobile and social advertising, deliver the right content to the right audience at the right time, and reduce the cost of sales.
INNsight set up Adwords campaigns on Google and integrated Stage Coach Lodge's inventory on Google Hotel Search.
INNsight's Premium Subscription includes Search Engine Marketing adspend management, which helped Stage Coach Lodge set a monthly budget for ad campaigns and optimize the keywords purchased for an online search.
INNsight takes a portion of the subscription and directly applies it toward PPC advertising with no additional cost for ongoing management.
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Search Engine Optimization:
While we aimed for Stage Coach Lodge to rank #1 on search engines, INNsight also utilized SEO to increase brand awareness and website traffic.
With the right expertise, websites, and businesses can see long-term growth by using some of the many SEO strategies. At INNsight, SEO is a creative and design process that begins as soon as we launch the website.
There's no such thing as guaranteed positions regarding search engine rankings. Gaining exposure requires high-quality content, social media marketing, and credible backlinks to your hospitality website.
By creating plagiarism-free quality content and focusing on branding, INNsight can increase direct booking traffic and ensure hotels appear at the top of search engine results.
Significant examples that create a robust framework for search engine spidering to associate high weightings for natural search include:
- Images have descriptive Alt-Tags.
- Each webpage has an OG image.
- FAQ and sitemap pages are assembled.
- Backlinks.
Strategy
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Focusing on Reviews:
INNsight helped Stage Coach Lodge maintain a positive reputation by soliciting more reviews and responding to every single review.
Asking and responding to all reviews significantly boosted Stage Coach Lodge's ranking on all OTAs, especially Tripadvisor.
Because OTAs consider review responses in their ranking procedure, this gave the hotel an undeniable advantage in addition to an opportunity to thank guests and inform them about what they were doing to improve their services.
Stage Coach Lodge has consistently improved its review rate year-over-year. The number of reviews obtained by the hotel increased by 18% in 2022 alone.
Review responses improve a guest's overall experience and increase their likeliness of becoming a repeat customer. With unfavorable reviews, INNsight communicated directly with the hotel to remedy any negativity and protect its reputation.
When negative reviews are read and responded to, the hotel can take necessary action to ensure the issue doesn't occur again.
This tactic built brand loyalty, as the hotel expressed that they genuinely cared about the guest experience. These efforts helped a 26-unit boutique hotel consistently rank as the #1 or #2 hotel in Monterey, an incredibly saturated and competitive market. It's evident that INNsight's Reputation Management System provided the hotel with a sustainable competitive advantage and ensured its success.
The consistent review responses gave Stage Coach Lodge more credibility than branded high-end properties, which led to a top rank on Tripadvisor.
The image below showcases a Tripadvisor bubble rating of 4.6. A bubble rating on Tripadvisor is a 1-5 ranking scale and summary of most guests' overall experience.
Guests can rate businesses based on their overall experience whenever they submit a written review. These overall ratings determine the bubble rating. For example, a 3 is average, and a 5 is perfect.
Stage Coach Lodge boasts a 4.6 Average TripAdvisor Score, which clearly displays that the hotel provides high-quality service to its guests. Stage Coach Lodge obtained most of their reviews with the help of INNsight's real-time guest review QR code and the Review Solicitation System.
The QR code is pictured throughout the hotel and encourages guests to leave a review. In addition, the Review Solicitation System automatically sends a tailored email offering guests to voice their feedback where negative comments are disintermediated, and positive feedback leads to a suggestion to leave a public review.
The image below highlights a response rate of 100% for Stage Coach Lodge.
According to Tripadvisor, “A good response rate is key to encouraging as many travelers as possible to inquire about your vacation rental. As technology has improved, people have become used to quick communication, and they will expect the same when booking a vacation. If your response rate is good, travelers know that they won’t need to wait long for a reply so will be more likely to book with you.”
INNsight ensures that our clients are proactive in responding to their reviews, positively affecting their position in search results.
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Website Development:
To launch the Stage Coach Lodge website, INNsight created a custom, easy-to-use, accessible, and aesthetically appealing design. In addition, because INNsight has an uptime of over 99.9%, the website was highly reliable due to its dedicated web hosting for hotels.
Providing an enhanced user experience was crucial in driving conversions. The optimal hotel website design gave the hotel a platform where they could connect with their customers and display the information that guests were genuinely looking for, which helped create new and long-term customer relationships.
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Get More Clicks:
When INNsight utilized PPC strategies, it increased conversion rates and decreased the cost of sales.
Because PPC advertising for hotels is easily measurable, it allowed us to ensure that content reached the right audience at the right time.
PPC made it simple for INNsight to provide relevant content based on target audience demographics and interests, which aided the hotel's social media and mobile advertising penetration.
In addition, INNsight helped Stage Coach Lodge connect its inventory directly to Google Hotel Search, which drove more incremental traffic and direct booking at zero commission.
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Quality Content:
One of the primary goals was to produce unique, high-quality content.
Thanks to INNsight’s professional SEO services, Stage Coach Lodge ranked high on reputable search engines when potential customers searched for hotels.
The consistent and engaging content built trust over time, generated more leads, and helped the property stand out from the competition. These steps resulted in excellent, long-lasting organic rankings.
Marketers that use blogs get 67% more leads than those that do not. A hotel blog is the simplest way to create a reliable authority for your business.
For example, Stage Coach Lodge posting about nearby attractions, such as the Bay Coast Guard Pier and the Wilder State Historic Park, ensured that potential guests received valuable information about the destination. Quality content, especially in the form of blogs, also reduces visitors' bounce rate because they will be more engaged.
By improving the user experience and building the brand image, Stage Coach Lodge saw increased direct booking traffic on its website.
Results
The following graphic represents data from January 2022 to December 2022.
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More Direct Revenue:
Stage Coach Lodge’s website, Powered by INNsight, drove an impressive $286,000 in direct revenue for the year, all through organic traffic derived from the SEO-optimized website, social media, and reputation management efforts.The hotel’s website drove nearly a quarter of all sales, with a definite runway for more in 2023. The website's conversion rate was 2x north of the industry average of 1.5%.
The hotel would have had to pay up to over 15% of this amount in OTA commissions, which would have cost the hotel almost $45,000 if this direct revenue had not been routed through the zero-cost booking engine powered by INNsight. An outstanding ($286,000-$8388)/($699 * 12 = $8388) = 3,285.79%+was the ROI driven byINNsight, at a minimum.
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Increased Returning Guests:
With 76.8% new visitors, Stage Coach Lodge saw a boost in direct sales. The website and easy, reliable, and secure booking engine helped 23.2% of the traffic as return guests. The hotel’s website helped build loyalty with its guests due to the lower rates offered when booking directly. -
High Website Traffic:
The majority of conversions were dependent on having an effective website. The highest traffic was direct, followed by organic and referral visits.
More direct traffic was attracted due to INNsight's custom website layout and graphics, unique content and branding, and more. INNsight’s team of experts is skilled in ensuring that the results of SEO efforts are lucrative and long-lasting.
Stage Coach Lodge was also able to grab more market share by staying updated on what their competition was charging with the help of INNsight's daily emails with pricing data from competitors.
Conclusion
INNsight's team leveraged their knowledge and experience to increase brand awareness, improve the online reputation, and drive significant direct revenue for Stage Coach Lodge.
An increase in brand awareness led to more brand loyalty and returning customers.
Additionally, seeing that the hotel could outrun hundreds of competitors on Tripadvisor, it's evident that INNsight implemented an effective reputation management strategy.
By responding to every review, INNsight ensured that guests felt appreciated and their concerns were heard. This benefited the public image of Stage Coach Lodge and its overall ranking across all major online reviews sites and Online Travel Agents.
INNsight's efforts contributed to defining the hotel as a trusted place to stay with travelers visiting the Monterey area on OTAs and helped drive significant direct revenue lift for the Stage Coach Lodge.
A professionally developed website, consistent quality content, and PPC ads were crucial aspects in raising Stage Coach Lodge’s website traffic, providing guests with the lowest rates, and driving more direct revenue.
The results exceeded both the hotel's initial estimation. INNsight’s technology and digital marketing practices have proven to be the best in the hospitality business.
See What Our Client Has Said
“INNsight has been an invaluable partner in the success of making our small lodge the top-ranked hotel in all of Monterey. We rely on INNsight for our entire digital experience. Not only does INNsight manage the hotel’s website, but their suite of software and services simplifies our technology needs and performs everything from managing rates and inventory with its CRS, managing the property with its PMS, driving direct bookings, and answering all our online guest reviews. INNsight is an indispensable toolkit for hotels.”
