The Cottages on the Key is a luxury vacation rental management (VRM) company in Siesta Key, Florida. Siesta Beach is consistently rated as America’s #1 beach. The area is in high demand, and the competition for accommodations is steep. To build brand loyalty, the Cottages on the Key team is committed to delivering customer service that exceeds guest expectations.
Growth Goals
With the goal of growth and increasing market competitiveness, the forward-thinking Director of Revenue, Barry Privette, sought out Aidaptive’s Predictive Hospitality—an Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform for hospitality brands. As a revenue management and marketing leader, Barry aimed to incorporate innovative technology that would help the business grow and evolve over time.
Barry, a self-proclaimed early adopter of AI, was particularly interested in the long-term compounding benefits, as AI technology learns from data to improve over time.
With the help of AI, they hoped to capture more direct bookings and deliver an improved booking experience for their guests.
The Steps They took
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- Integrate their PMS and other systems to ingest historical bookings and customer data.
- The Aidaptive AI engine built predictive insights into each guest’s intent.
- Aidaptive created and launched a highly personalized booking journey for each guest, for each website visit – on autopilot. Aidaptive powered Predictive Property Recommendations on both the website homepage and property pages.
Personalized Booking Experiences
The Predictive Hospitality platform works by generating real-time insights about each guest’s intent and purchasing power (returning and anonymous guests alike). The AI platform is able to leverage all historical and real-time session data to make predictions about their unique needs. With those intent predictions, the platform generates highly personalized booking journeys on autopilot. This can take the form of which hero image a guest is shown to pique interest, which properties are recommended, or which content is suggested.
Their Results
Over three months, personalization was served to over 16,000 website visitors.
The first notable result was an increase in engagement. Aidaptive’s personalized homepage property recommendations saw a staggering +38% increase in click-through rates (CTR). The overall site CTR increased +18%.
The higher engagement translated to a +27% increase in their booking conversion rate.
The increase in engagement, bookings, and conversion rates meant guests were more likely to book a property when they were shown Aidaptive’s Predictive Property Recommendations.
Through exposure to only 50% of website traffic, Predictive Hospitality and personalized recommendations generated 24% more revenue per web visitor for the Cottages on the Key team.
In total, the Cottages on the Key generated an additional $167,000 in direct revenue.
Year over Year Comparions
Digging deeper into the results, the Cottages on the Key team wanted to compare their total website performance with the total website performance a year prior, without personalization.
Predictive Hospitality resulted in:
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- +17% increase in engaged sessions YoY
- +54% increase in bookings YoY
- +56% increase in revenue YoY
- +27% increase in RPS (revenue per session) YoY
The team also wanted to understand the impact of Aidaptive personalization on specific acquisition channels.
Guest that came through organic search channels generated:
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- +3% increase in engaged sessions YoY
- +43% increase in bookings YoY
- +50% increase in revenue YoY
- +27% increase in RPS (revenue per session) YoY
Direct search traffic that experienced Aidaptive personalization generated:
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- +30% increase in engaged sessions YoY
- +57% increase in bookings YoY
- +62% increase in revenue YoY
- +36% increase in RPS (revenue per session) YoY
Looking Forward
To build on their revenue growth and amplify the impact of AI, the Cottages on the Key team plans to leverage additional use-cases provided by Aidaptive’s Predictive Hospitality platform.
Personalized email marketing segmentation and AI-powered property search and sort order are examples of additional use-cases that improve business productivity and increase overall revenue.
