At A Glance

39x

Achieved a 39x ROAS

USD 2,358,716

Revenue of USD 2,358,716

18,662

room nights booked

Client Testimonial

Backstory

Celebrating the spirit of discovery, Wharf Hotels is known to pay homage to the legendary spirit of travel, exploring and sharing experiences.

The group currently operates 17 hotels across China, Hong Kong SAR of China and the
Philippines, under their legacy brand of Marco Polo Hotels and luxury brand, Niccolo Hotels.

Backstory

Celebrating the spirit of discovery, Wharf Hotels is known to pay homage to the legendary spirit of travel, exploring and sharing experiences.

The group currently operates 17 hotels across China, Hong Kong SAR of China and the
Philippines, under their legacy brand of Marco Polo Hotels and luxury brand, Niccolo Hotels.

Challenge

Sometime in May 2019, Wharf Hotels reached out to us at eVietGlobal LLC – they needed
help with putting together a stronger digital marketing strategy. At that time,
they were facing two major challenges.

High dependency on Online Travel Agencies (OTAs)

Hotels and Online Travel Agencies (Expedia, Booking.com, Hotels.com, etc.) have always shared a tricky relationship.

While hotels depend on OTAs for visibility and reservations, the high commission fees they’re charged in return eats into their bottom line and is a cause for frustration amongst most hoteliers.

Wharf Hotels was struggling with the same issue – they realized they were too reliant on OTAs and wanted to reduce that dependency.

Decline in hotel occupancy during summer months

Every hotel has that dreaded off-season – a period when their occupancy is at an all-time low.

For Wharf Hotels, this period is usually during the summer months, between March to June. Every year, during these months, they experience a downfall in their hotel occupancy rates (as can be seen in the charts below).

To tackle this challenge, Wharf Hotels has been running a summer campaign for the last four years. Being exclusively applicable to the summer months, the campaigns have performed fairly well, bringing in a considerable number of reservations and revenue.

Similarly, this year too, they decided to launch the summer campaign in May with two clear objectives:

a. Their hotels should be easy to find and easy to book
b. They need to drive more profitable revenue growth

The campaign was ready but the question was – how can they strategically promote it to drive incremental room nights and revenue during the off-season months?

This is where eVietGlobal LLC came in.

Solution

To begin with, we were given two main targets to achieve, during the period of May to August:

A. Increase bookings from the brand sites and generate a 14x ROAS
B. Drive incremental revenue of USD 840,000 with a booking of 5,250 room nights

Our promotion strategy comprised of running Google Search, Display, Programmatic, Facebook and YouTube ads.

We spent a total of USD 60,000 in digital advertising.

In addition to digital media placements, we also leveraged tactical channels to improve conversion rates.

We enabled website push notifications, giving new visitors the option of subscribing. On becoming a subscriber, they were presented with the summer campaign offer.

We also set up exit-intent popups that were triggered when a website visitor would try to leave the website. These popups carried the campaign offer messaging and were installed with an aim to increase conversions.

Apart from these two tactical channels, we also had a smart retargeting strategy in place to re-engage visitors, bring them back to the website and convert them.

All these tactics helped push website visitors further down the sales funnel, encouraging them to make a booking.