In this episode of the Hotel Moment podcast, Karen Stephens, Revinate CMO, is joined by Carlo Del Mistro, Chief Digital Officer at Ennismore, to introduce a loyalty program that breaks tradition. Mistro gives a sneak peek into how the “Dis-loyalty” program works by encouraging guests to visit properties in the company’s entire portfolio, and how data is the key to attracting and retaining these guests.

Listen for a refreshing perspective on building a loyalty program that works and why hoteliers shouldn’t be afraid to push boundaries, innovate, and leverage guest data even after the stay ends.

Meet your host

As Chief Marketing Officer at Revinate, Karen Stephens is focused on driving long-term growth by building Revinate’s brand equity, product marketing, and customer acquisition strategies. Her deep connections with hospitality industry leaders play a key role in crafting strategic partnerships.

Karen is also the host of The Hotel Moment Podcast, where she interviews top players in the hospitality industry. Karen has been with Revinate for over 11 years, leading Revinate’s global GTM teams. Her most recent transition was from Chief Revenue Officer, where she led the team in their highest booking quarter to date in Q4 2023.

Karen has more than 25 years of expertise in global hospitality technology and online distribution — including managing global accounts in travel and hospitality organizations such as Travelocity and lastminute.com

Connect with Karen

Transcript

Intro – 00:00:04:Welcome to the Hotel Moment podcast presented by Revinate, the podcast where we discuss how hotel technology shapes every moment of the hotelier’s experience. Tune in as we explore the cutting edge technology transforming the hospitality industry and hear from experts and visionaries shaping the future of guest experiences. Whether you’re a hotelier or a tech enthusiast, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive in and discover how we can elevate the art of hospitality together.

Karen Stephens 00:00:36: Hello, and welcome back to the Hotel Moment podcast. I am your host, Karen Stephens, the Chief Marketing Officer of Revinate. And with me today is Carlo Del Mistro, Chief Digital Officer at Ennismore. With a track record of driving digital innovation and strategic transformation, Carlo has played key roles in companies such as Virgin Hotels. And now with Ennismore, he is spearheading groundbreaking initiatives, making him a prominent figure at the forefront of hospitality.

Welcome to the podcast, Carlo.

Carlo Del Mistro – 00:01:04: Thank you, Karen. It is a pleasure to be here.

Karen Stephens – 00:01:06: We connected in May of this year. So Carlo was one of our speakers at Navigate London, which was one of our inaugural events. And right off the back of that presentation, I said, we have to get you on the podcast. So I really appreciate you doing this. So as a starting point, you want to just tell us a little bit about Ennismore, the company itself. And also, I think it’s interesting, you’ve kind of had two tours of duty at this company. So maybe just a high level overview of who is Ennismore, and then we’ll take it from there.

Carlo Del Mistro – 00:01:37: So Karen, Ennismore is a hotel management company based in London. We have about 150 hotels under management currently. Most of them are in the luxury lifestyle space. So you probably heard about The Hoxton, SLS, Delano, Mama Shelter, 25Hours. And most recently, we have announced a partnership with Our Habitas. It’s our newest addition to our group of hotels. In addition to that, we also have resorts, all-inclusive resorts, like Rixos. And we are growing to be part of the business and some standalone restaurant business as well. For example, Paris Society. And now we also have a partnership with Rikas, which is a group based in Dubai. So we have about an additional 150 hotels in the pipeline. We have 400 restaurants. So it’s a growing group. And we’re part of Accor. So during the pandemic, we were independent. But then in 2021, we basically agreed to a merger with Accor. So we’re now part of the Accor family.

Karen Stephens – 00:02:39: That’s great. So Accor, obviously one of the largest hotel companies in the world, maybe the largest hotel company in the world. And I think what’s interesting about that merger and how you’ve kind of come through it is that the brands that you’re talking about are all known in the industry as beautiful lifestyle brands that all have their own unique personality and character. So you mentioned The Hoxton, Mondrian, SLS, all these beautiful brands. And then you get folded into a gigantic company, Accor. So can you talk to me a little bit about how you preserve the personality of those brands? Because there’s obviously a lot of advantages of being with Accor, but how do you preserve the spirit of the lifestyle brands?

Carlo Del Mistro – 00:03:19: The beauty of the partnership that we have with Accor is that we are not independent, but we have autonomy within Accor. So we maintain Ennismore as sort of our internal brand. However, what we do is we really let our brand speak. So we talk about ourselves, we say we are a brand-led company. So we are not organized by geographies, but we are organized by brands. So we have a global brand that leads, that manages a specific brand or a subset of the brands. And this has been very successful. We also have a very close relationship with the founders. Basically, the founders of the brand are still pretty much with the company, starting with Sharan, who was the original founder of Ennismore is still one of our two co-CEOs. And Founder of 25Hours Hotel, Mama Shelter, they’re still part of Ennismore. And this allows us to continue to grow the original brand, and be true to their DNA. And I think it’s one of the key differentiators of the way we do hospitality. And the reason why, even though we are part of Accor, and as you’re saying, it’s not the largest hotel company in the world, we are able to take advantage of the scale of Accor. But then we’re still able to continue to be true to our original or the original vision of the founder, original vision of each of our brands.

Karen Stephens – 00:04:39: And that’s a great way. I love the idea of autonomy within that, because you think about if you are a core and you’re going to make this acquisition, the reason you’re buying the brands is because of that lifestyle and the uniqueness, that offering, which kind of brings us on to the real meat of the topic I wanted to talk to you today, which is the Dis-loyalty program. So obviously all major brands, whether it’s Accor, Marriott, Hilton, they all have points programs and a lot of corporate travelers. There’s obviously global distribution with those hotels. But you’ve done something very unique with Ennismore and Dis-loyalty. So can you just tell us at a highest level, what is Dis-loyalty and how is it different?

Carlo Del Mistro – 00:05:17: Dis-loyalty is our membership program. We don’t call it a loyalty program. We want to talk about members. And there’s a paid membership program. So from day one, if you decide to become a member, you pay your membership fee. And you suddenly have access to all your benefits. There are no tiers, there are no points. It’s a very simple program. It’s based around discounts on our hotels and our restaurants, plus a set of additional benefits. For example, we’re about to roll out additional benefits in some of our owned inclusive resorts, where clearly discounts on restaurants don’t make as much sense because you already have this. You just get all inclusive, so there’s going to be a discount on the activities and additional benefits in Rixos resort. And what our members get is the chance to experience the full breadth of our offering. And the reason why we launch it is really to focus on getting the people, our guests that love Hoxton, that love SLS, that love Delano, to discover the other brands within our ecosystem. Because what we knew and what we saw from our data is that we have customers that are extremely loyal to Mama Shelter. But they have no idea that Hoxton or 25 hours are part of the same family or brand. Therefore, they always travel with Mama Shelter, and then one day they go to New York, and they check on the Mama Shelter website for a hotel in New York. There are no Mama Shelters in New York. And what happens to the guests? To be honest, we have no idea. It just disappears. It may actually end up staying in The Hoxton. Maybe they don’t book directly with The Hoxton. They book via booking.com because they’re not aware of The Hoxton as a brand. So what we are trying to do with this loyalty is to capture these guests, these Mama lovers, Mondrian lovers, and actually retain them within the ecosystem. And so far it’s been very successful.

Karen Stephens – 00:07:14: And I think what I love about it, so you mentioned it’s a cost to join the program, but it’s very nominal. I mean, remind me, I think it’s like 20 euros a month. It’s not a big expense.

Carlo Del Mistro – 00:07:23: Yeah, even less than that. It depends on the currency. It’s 15 euros, 18 dollars. So it’s very affordable for the benefit you get.

Karen Stephens – 00:07:32: Absolutely. So some of those benefits, as you mentioned, if I’m a Hoxton loyalist or a Mama Shelter loyalist and I want to go to a new destination and experience Mondrian for the first time. As a Dis-loyalty member, what do I get if I do that?

Carlo Del Mistro – 00:07:46: So for the first time you stay in a new hotel, we will give you 20% off your full stay. And this is just like at the beginning. You also get a 10% off F&B. You get a free barista made drink every day. And what we also give you is that if you’re visiting a brand new hotel, so anything that has just been opened, you get actually 50% off rather than 20. So 50% off in a new open hotel is probably the biggest reason why people join this loyalty at the beginning. But what we have seen is that once they try this loyalty, they usually stay for a long time. So we have very low churn rates. And for example, we recently opened The Hoxton in Vienna, and it was one of the most successful new openings we ever had within Ennismore. The hotel was basically fully sold out. And one of the biggest reasons for this success was actually the success of Dis-loyalty. We had a very high interest from guests, from diners, and the hotel was very lively, very successful from the very get-go.

Karen Stephens – 00:08:49: It’s just such a great idea. I think we saw a lot. We had Navigate and Learn. We had Navigate to Miami. In our Miami presentation, we had Deloitte present and talked a lot about younger generations, it’s all about experiences. And you think about if you’re able to experience a brand new opening of a hotel like that at a 50% off, which is not available anywhere else, very smart from a distribution perspective, then you can really experience kind of the best that hospitality has to offer to get you familiar with the brand and get you in the door. And then ongoing 20% off. Well, I mean, if I’m a hotelier, I would rather have Dis-loyalty members come into my hotel and give them 20% off that first day and get them to repeat the book than to pay an OTA commission. So for me, it’s just brilliant. I’m the biggest fan, Carlo. I just love it. But do you have an idea of the demographics of the folks that sign up for these programs? What is kind of the split of what you’re seeing?

Carlo Del Mistro – 00:09:51: Absolutely. The real core of our Dis-loyalty members is the 25, 45-year-old traveling quite a bit for both business and leisure. They usually stay in their lifestyle. We are mostly lifestyle. So in the lifestyle style of the hotel. And for them, it’s very important. The whole atmosphere of the hotel, the F&B is a key to what we do. So I think people are really keen on F&B. And what we’ve been seeing is that this demographic is quite consistent across brands. We clearly are very successful at recruiting members on our properties. As you would expect, the cities where we have the most of our hotels, London, Paris, Dubai, those are the cities where we have big clusters of members. But we also see more regional hubs where we also have hotels, but also where we have a good number of travelers. And then I will split our members in the members that are primarily focused on travel. So the people that are traveling to our hotels. But we also have quite a significant number of members that are focusing more on the F&B experiences. And we clearly have the 10% off. But then we have special offers in certain periods where there’s a higher discount as well. So we have members that come to our hotels for meetings. And then they become Dis-loyalty members for their free barista drink. Also the discount on F&B. And we are also seeing people that love traveling. And therefore maybe they start with F&B, but then they stay with us for travel.

Karen Stephens – 00:11:20: They stay in the hotel. Yeah. So I think that’s another feature of the program. If you happen to be in a city like London or Amsterdam or LA or etc., where you’ve got a hotel that is part of Ennismore there, you also get a free barista drink. So it becomes a place where you can hang out in your hometown, in addition.

Carlo Del Mistro – 00:11:37: Absolutely. We see a significant number that are primarily coffee drinkers coming to Hoxton or coming to 25hours for meetings or for studying or for meeting friends. The benefit of the free barista drink is probably that it’s worth the membership on its own. Because if you think about the price of a coffee in most of our cities is in the three, four, five euro pounds or dollars. Once a week, you’re already paid for your membership.

Karen Stephens – 00:12:03: You’ve already paid for it. Absolutely. So shifting gears a little bit now to talk about technology on the back end. So I’ll mention that Revinate is obviously a partner with Ennismore. So we’re working with all of your brands today. And you talked about F&B and the other things that are kind of the ancillary services that you’ve got on property. So can you talk a little bit about the importance of collecting data throughout the stay? How are you using that as Ennismore to make sure that you’re targeting the right guests with the right message from start to finish?

Carlo Del Mistro – 00:12:32: Data is clearly at the core of what we do. And one of the reasons why this loyalty is such a powerful tool is because it allows us to have a clear vision of our members’ spending habits and their travel habits. Because we are the sum of many brands that used to be individual. They had their own technology stack, their own data repositories. We are on a multi-year journey to actually have this single customer view and build really an understanding of how our most loyal guests spend their time, spend their money. And this loyalty is at the core of this effort because it allows us to actually capture not only the hotel stays, which historically has been the easiest part, but also what it will allow us to do is build a visibility there from this spend. Because that’s usually where hotels especially have the most trouble because guests not very often add their bills to their room. And therefore, having Dis-loyalty gives us an additional toolkit to try to craft guests across the journey.

Karen Stephens – 00:13:34: To try and figure that out. Absolutely. And I think that’s something that we’re very focused on as well. So how do we pick up the restaurant, spa, golf, any other ancillary? The buzzword now in hospitality is Total RevPar, T RevPar.

Carlo Del Mistro – 00:13:48: Yeah, absolutely. But also for us is the key. Lifestyle is defined more about the importance of F&B on the overall revenue of the hotel. And I think all our hotels and all our resorts are really focused on the F&B, on the bar. And therefore, being able to capture as much data on our guests’ habits, I think is fundamental. And again, it’s a very long journey and it’s going to take us a few years to get to where we want to be. But adding tools like Dis-loyalty at our disposal becomes extremely important.

Karen Stephens – 00:14:22: Absolutely. I think a lot of folks, if you’re not familiar as a listener with Dubai as a market, F&B spend in Dubai far outpaces normally hotel rates, which are also very high. But there’s such a huge and all of those hotels have branches on the weekends. And so there’s your customer that’s in the hotel and then there’s your local customer, which, again, I think is what’s so compelling about this program. Because then hopefully when they go to travel, they eat in your hotels on the weekends in Dubai and then they go travel and try some other brands. Just as an example.

Carlo Del Mistro – 00:14:55: Absolutely. And that’s why we believe we are so successful in the cities where we have the most hotels, because that’s where our members discover new restaurants, discover new facilities. We are about to launch an app supporting Dis-loyalty. And this is where we’re going to have an easier way for our members to discover all the various locations where we can use the Dis-loyalty membership. Because today you clearly, as I was saying, you maybe love the Hoxton, you maybe love SLS, but you are not so familiar about whether you can actually find other Ennismore properties. And having this feature could allow you to make it easier to find a new location, new restaurants. It’s going to be like a bit of a game changer. And from our Members Service, we know this is probably the top feature that they require.

Karen Stephens – 00:15:43: Absolutely. Well, can you just give our listeners a little bit of insight into, as a hotelier, how do you come up with these strategies to be bold? I mean, again, I mentioned it’s such a unique feature. And what do you think led to that? Is it because you still have kind of the core owners and operators that brought these brands up that were a part of it? Can you just give us a little bit of a peek into how, as a business, you’re able to come up with ideas like this and make them work?

Carlo Del Mistro – 00:16:12: Absolutely. And use and delivery is the beauty of the partnership with Accor. Being able to be autonomous allows us to push a bit the boundaries about what is possible to do at a larger scale in hospitality. And as you’re saying, adding the founders still part of our company allows us to be thinking a bit outside of the box. And especially with our main proposition, which is to be brand-led, allows us to really think about what we can do to really push our brands to the forefront. Ennismore is not a B2C brand. So most of our guests have never heard of Ennismore, and they will not know what Ennismore is. So we decided not to push Ennismore as a brand. It will never be a B2C brand. But what we’re focusing on is trying to find other ways to create the connection between the brands. And that’s when the idea of creating a program like Dis-loyalty that actually incentivizes you to try new brands, to try new locations, came to us. And this is where we have a very strong brand team, and they always come up with great ideas. And this variety was one of the most successful.

Karen Stephens – 00:17:23: It was a good one. And so one final question for you. Obviously, you work within Accor portfolios. Is there any opportunity to reach out past Accor when you see, I would say, Revinate has some of the most beautiful brands in hospitality? Is there any possibility to extend Dis-loyalty outside the bounds of Accor?

Carlo Del Mistro – 00:17:42: Yeah, absolutely. So Dis-loyalty is focusing on the Ennismore properties. As I mentioned earlier, we’re just partnered with Habitas. So we are very keen to understand what are ways we can actually work with Habitas on Dis-loyalty. But we are very keen on working with outside brands. So if we find that there are independent hotels that are interested in potentially talking with us to see if they can join Dis-loyalty, that’s something that definitely we are keen to do. And what really matters to us is the right type of brand that fits with Habitas, with what we’re trying to build at Ennismore.

Karen Stephens – 00:18:19: Well, you heard it here first. I would encourage everybody to check out the program. I’m certainly going to sign up. I love it. My guest today was Carlo Del Mistro, the Chief Digital Officer of Ennismore. Thank you for your time, Carlo.

Carlo Del Mistro – 00:18:31: Thank you very much, Karen.

Outro – 00:18:37: Thank you for joining us on this episode of Hotel Moment by Revinate. Our community of hoteliers is growing every week, and each guest we speak to is tackling industry challenges with the innovation and flexibility that our industry demands. If you enjoyed today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and leave a review. And if you’re listening on YouTube, please like the video and subscribe for more content. For more information, head to revinate.com/hotelmomentpodcast. Until next time, keep innovating.

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