Customers

Hamilton Island - a case study

Background

Hamilton Island is the largest inhabited island in the Whitsunday's, located just off the Queensland Coast on the Great Barrier Reef. The island is one of Australia's favourite holiday destinations, providing a tropical getaway for both holiday makers and conference goers

The Challenge

It is vital for Hamilton Island to capture and track the contact details of all guests to ensure the island is able to develop effective marketing campaigns specifically targeted to different segments of their guest population. For example, Hamilton Island should be able to identify its most valuable guests and provide them with specialised incentives to encourage repeat visits. Unfortunately, under the island's previous data management system, if any address information for a guest was missing or incorrect, the island's system had no way of identifying potentially lucrative repeat customers. With their old system, the error rate for guests' contact information in the database was often as high as 25% or more.

Inaccurate address data meant that Hamilton Island was unable to conduct efficient direct marketing campaigns. Although they had established a database of guests using recency, frequency and monetary segmentation to identify the most valuable potential repeat customers, without accurate addresses they were unable to contact them. Every direct marketing campaign resulted in numerous bounces leading to lost opportunities and wasted marketing dollars. Hamilton Island was also eager to develop demographic segments in their guest database to both gain a clearer understanding of the current guests and to improve the marketing of each specific hotel to the needs and desires of different types of guests. For example young, urban couples could be sent information about different hotel properties or holiday offers than those sent to a family with young children. Before this level of segmentation and targeting was possible, Hamilton Island needed to ensure complete and accurate addresses were being entered and maintained in the hotel's data management system.

The Solution

Hamilton Island engaged Experian QAS to deploy QAS Pro in the reservations department to ensure accurate addresses were entered on check-in and via direct bookings.

QAS Pro uses an address verification software designed to instantly verify addresses against the latest Australia Post Postal Address File (PAF). Users search addresses using the software, which then automatically enters the verified, complete and standardised address into their existing database. This ensures that staff taking direct bookings are now always capturing correct address information either prior to or at check-in. "It is vital that we get our guests' contact details correct the first time because once they have checked out it is too late" said Nathan Bowen, Project Manager - Business Intelligence, Hamilton Island.

Once Hamilton Island's guest data was captured correctly, it was imperative that it stayed up to date. To ensure their database is cleaned and verified on a daily basis, Hamilton Island also deployed QAS Batch, which validates daily each record in their database against the latest PAF. To develop highly individual marketing campaigns for specific hotel properties or to specific types of guests, the guest database was further segmented using QAS DataPlus. These applications enhanced the information in Hamilton Island's existing database with geodemographic information, latitude and longitude information and household composition statistics.

The Results

By having more accurate guest data, Hamilton Island could engage in more personalised and targeted campaigns. This allowed the resort to identify repeat guests more accurately and provide repeat guests with similar offerings and promotions based on their previous experiences

With improved accuracy, the value of their data returned from the exercise increased dramatically. According to Nathan, "We have seen huge benefits from the deployment of the Experian QAS systems. The error rate in our guest database dropped from as high as 25% before the installation down to 3.45% after the exercise. The cost of running our direct marketing campaigns has been reduced. More importantly, the marketing department has added confidence in the quality of the data and this has reduced their hesitation towards running specific campaigns."

Hamilton Island has been so pleased with the implementation and results they are looking to incorporate the Experian QAS solutions into other areas of their operations. "Experian account managers were great and made sure our implementation went through without a hitch and the on-site training was excellent," said Nathan. "The value for money with the QAS systems we have deployed has been fantastic. We are currently looking at other parts of the business that could benefit from these systems."