sojern.com / [email protected] Case Study Case Study Case Study Customer Profile Recognised as one of the world’s leading hotel and leisure brands, Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, Inc. has a portfolio of over 1,200 properties across 11 internationally renowned brands in the world’s most exciting destinations. From city centre locations to relaxing resorts, Starwood provides the best in hospitality. Marriott International announced that it purchased Starwood in 2015, creating the world’s largest hotel company when the acquisition completed in 2016. Campaign Objectives Starwood and Sojern have worked together for over a year, running top-performing campaigns to drive direct bookings across the EMEA region. The teams wanted to take the partnership to the next level by testing programmatic media as a way to overcome one of their stickiest pain points: driving bookings for specific cities during temporary periods of lower bookings due to seasonal variances and other unforeseen events. “We struggle with ‘soft’ destinations, which are those locations that aren’t meeting our occupancy goals,” said Katerina Orfanidi, Associate Director of Tactical Marketing EAME. In addition to filling rooms during difficult periods, Starwood was also concerned with keeping ‘spillage’ to a minimum—Starwood wanted people to book the destination for the ad they were seeing, and not a Starwood hotel in another, perhaps stronger, market. Sojern and Starwood agreed on a three-month campaign, a €3:1 ROI, and 35% of all EMEA bookings going to six specific cities experiencing such ‘softness’. To further refine the lower funnel campaign goals, Sojern targeted in-market travellers from specific origin markets—driving them to book directly with properties in these six ‘soft’ cities. Sojern’s Approach If you aren’t using data to target the right person at the right time, they may book with your brand, but might not book the location or property you’re actually looking to fill—a problem when you’re looking to support softer markets. “People may see a banner ad to visit Prague, for example, but book a hotel in a completely different location,” explains Orfanidi, “The Sojern team used their predictive audience technology and specialised algorithms to find people who signalled intent to visit our target cities, serve them specific creatives and drive direct bookings to these cities and properties.” Starwood