Peter Gorla, Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer, Managing Director – VOILÀ Hotel Rewards, is excited about an innovative new loyalty program that launched a the newly renovated The L.A. Hotel Downtown.
VOILÀ Hotel Rewards, the world’s No. 1 independent hotel loyalty program, launched the program that offers free membership as well as worldwide points and travel perks.
With L.A. Hotel Loyalty Rewards, members will earn 10 VOILÀ points for every dollar they spend during qualifying stays at The L.A. Hotel Downtown and other participating VOILÀ network hotels worldwide. Points can be redeemed for complimentary hotel Award Nights, airline miles, online merchandise, or even charitable donations. What’s more, members receive exclusive travel perks that may include priority check-ins, room-class upgrades, or personalized welcome amenities.
Gorla told Loyalty360 that the overarching goal for the L.A. Hotel Loyalty Rewards program is to ensure that The L.A. Hotel Downtown competes effectively against global chain hotels in their market and receives their ‘fair share of the wallet’ from their guests.
“The precise objectives of the program are to drive member ‘channel-shift’ to more direct – and less costly – booking channels, attract new guests, retain existing guests, increase frequency of stay, increase length of say, and increase ancillary revenue spend,” Gorla explained. “The channel-shifting benefit alone can mean a savings of over 20% on room revenue by directing bookings away from OTAs, who commonly charge 25% per booking, to the hotel’s direct booking channel. By working with The L.A. Hotel Downtown to build a substantial database of members, the VOILÀ platform creates a powerful data asset which will ensure the goals and objectives of the program are achieved.”
The L.A. Hotel Loyalty Rewards program is a truly white-label program, while still enjoying the comprehensive features and rich ecosystem of redemption partners and global award night opportunities, typically reserved only for the global chain programs.
“To achieve this for a single, stand-alone hotel like L.A. Hotel Downtown or for a larger group of ‘independent’ hotels, VOILÀ leverages proprietary technology and our globally distributed team of loyalty experts,” Gorla said. “VOILÀ acts as the supporting network (similar to Star Alliance or OneWorld for frequent flyer programs). It’s in that way that VOILÀ enables L.A. Hotel Loyalty Rewards members to earn and redeem points across a wide variety of hotels and redemption partners throughout the VOILÀ global network.”
In developing this program, the officials at the L.A. Hotel Downtown were determined to learn how best to approach their new loyalty program.
“They learned quickly from their guests that control over their earned currency and ability to redeem easily across many different options was extremely important,” Gorla said. “VOILÀ delivers a great solution for this objective by providing the L.A. Hotel Downtown with a loyalty program platform with dozens of redemption partners and a global network of hotels which can be leveraged by members for Award Nights.”
Looking ahead, Gorla envisions a greater focus on creating a cohesive user experience across each channel, including web, mobile, and email.
“There has been a big push recently to ensure that mobile experiences are comprehensive and rich, however, this has sometimes come at the expense of offering a radically different experience for mobile versus web and email,” he said. “People have extremely limited time. To make the most of customers’ time, brands must make the multichannel experience as consistent and similar as possible. Otherwise, we are simply asking customers and loyalty program members to re-learn too much. Put simply, loyalty program members don’t have time to make sense of two or three different user experiences and/or loyalty propositions, so it’s up to us to ensure simplicity and consistency.”