What is an Influencer Worth to a Hotel? A Case Study with NYC’s MADE Hotel
The perennial question in all marketing ecosystems is: did this effort drive ROI? This is a question that has plagued the hotel world for decades and has been even further spotlighted with the rise of the Instagram influencer. With severely limited ability to measure ROI from influencer marketing, hotels have thrown up their hands in frustration. The general sentiment: "I know in my gut that many influencers drive revenue, but I don't know how to select them or measure success!"
In September 2019, Eric Freitas, the general manager of MADE Hotel in New York City shared this frustration and decided to do something about it via his hotel's existing partnership with Curacity. Curacity, a marketing technology and data company with products designed to drive direct hotel bookings, works with over 300 boutique and luxury hotels. The company's newest product utilizes influencers to drive hotel bookings.
The results speak for themselves. From September 2019 to March 2020, Curacity placed 21 influencers into MADE's rooms and tracked the purchasing activity (online and offline) from each influencer's followers. Curacity's Instagram product—designed alongside Instagram's product and technology teams—drove 64 nights to MADE. "It was amazing to see in action: put 1 influencer into the system, get 3 nights out! The veil on influencer marketing had finally been lifted—we placed influencers into empty rooms and saw real booking ROI, not to mention the intangible marketing value and content that was created" says Freitas.
How does it all work? Curacity sources and verifies influencers based on a proprietary influencer score, which optimizes for revenue production. "Content aesthetics and brand alignment with a hotel are important, but we've long believed that the data underlying an influencer and their audience is a far better predicter of their ability to perform for the hotel in the long run" says Nick Slavin, Curacity's co-founder and President. Once influencers have been scored, they select a hotel stay via Curacity's influencer platform, stay at the property, and post via Instagram. Curacity's technology then aggregates encrypted data on everyone that engaged with that post and matches it against similar data collected from the hotel.
"The challenging thing with attribution in the hotel space is that bookings can result from content months after that content is first consumed and can be made via countless channels. Our technology can track bookings that occur months later, regardless of channel. We're thrilled to be bringing this into the hotel mainstream" says Nick Slavin.
Curacity's Instagram product is currently in its beta phase but has already been working with over 30 hotels to use influencers to drive booking revenue. "What is particularly exciting to me" says Nick Slavin "is that we're in the early innings—with more data, we can better optimize and create even more powerful matches between influencers and hotels."
About Curacity
Curacity is a data analytics company focused on the hotel sector. It's mission is to scale and measure the point of influence in the customer decision-making cycle to drive direct bookings to it's hotel partners.
Please reach out to [email protected] to schedule a time to discuss how Curacity can work with your exclusive properties!
About Curacity
Curacity is a data analytics and marketing platform for hospitality brands. Powered by its proprietary attribution technology, Curacity drives new demand and generates incremental revenue for hotels, resorts, and cruises. It uniquely leverages earned media content distributed across a network of media brands such as AFAR, Food & Wine, and Travel + Leisure. Headquartered in New York and Stamford, CT, Curacity launched in 2015. The company is listed among the top 10 in travel and hospitality on the Inc. 5000 list and is Digiday's Best Content Marketing Platform of 2024.
Megan Zilenziger
Chief of Stuff
Curacity