Flip.to Blog

In the heart of North Carolina’s Piedmont Triad, Christina York is the Director of Sales and Marketing for the 244-room Grandover Resort & Spa. She leads a small, but mighty team on the sales side, and an even smaller team on the marketing side.

Deployed as part of the first-of-its-kind NorthCarolinaBound collaborative, Flip.to’s out-of-the-box platform is built with hoteliers like Christina in mind. We do all the heavy lifting, so properties like Grandover get started with a copy-&-paste, and spend only a few minutes per week—yet net incredible impact.

Here’s what that looks like for Christina.

The results

The Flip.to platform is moving the needle for Grandover Resort & Spa with a minimal investment of time spent behind the scenes.

Sponsored by Visit North Carolina, lodging partners across the state are joining the NorthCarolinaBound collaborative at no cost to them. And in Greensboro, Christina is grateful to have the platform working for her.

It’s acting as an extension of her marketing efforts, introducing the resort to travelers in the inspiration and dreaming phase through Advocacy, and sparking conversations with planners in the booking phase through Discovery.

Lightweight by design

As a full-service, independent resort surrounded by 36 holes of golf, Grandover is an unexpected find in Greensboro. “It’s not the first place people think about going for a vacation,” explains Christina.

Yet, there’s a strong drive market within a six-hour radius, to which the platform has introduced over 26,000 potential travelers in the past 90 days. “These are people we would not have reached without Flip.to,” she added. “Every time I look at the dashboard, I’m like, ‘Hey, this is working. This is cool!'”

From the start of NCBound, the Flip.to team made things turnkey for Christina.

“The onboarding process was tremendous. The service from the Flip.to folks was really amazing, and they walked us through very patiently. There was lots of education and hand-holding once we were all set up and going.”

Customer Success representative, Sam Gedihovich, is a great part of Grandover’s success. She keeps an eye on the resort’s efforts, and strategizes next moves, preserving Christina’s time for other tasks.

Why NCBound?

Visit NC is making this technology possible—supercharging Christina’s marketing while she’s executing her day-to-day—and lifting the entire community to compete for a larger share of travelers.

“I have really good feelings about Visit NC, and what they’re doing. They’re proactive, and I’m always surprised by the initiatives they take. They always seem to be onto creative things.”

If you’d like to be a part of something bigger in the North Carolina community, join NCBound here.

“The least important thing when booking a hotel reservation is the hotel room,” says Adam Hartenberger, which sums up a bold marketing ethos. In the ever-changing world of hotel marketing, the statement guides Adam’s open-minded approach to stay ahead of the curve.

“I think where a lot of hoteliers get lost is the one thing that most hoteliers sell on—hotel rooms. And really when you think about your vacation, most people can’t explain the hotel room they stayed in. They talk about the things they went on vacation to do.”

As Assistant Director of Marketing at The Osthoff Resort, Adam focuses on the experiences his lakeside resort in Wisconsin offers. As part of that effort, he relies on Flip.to to drive those experiential conversations with future guests. In fact, his team has become one of the most creative users of the platform to date.

Sparking conversations with traveler planners

After Advocacy proved very effective in inspiring dreamers, Adam was introduced to the newest part of the platform by Flip.to’s Account Executive for Customer Success, Joseph Meuse.

Discovery is a reimagined booking path built to spark more meaningful conversations with travelers in the planning phase. Though Adam was intrigued, he admits he was a skeptic at first.

“When Joe [from Flip.to] pitched us on Discovery, he said, ‘Watch the numbers. Your conversion percentage is going to increase.’ I’m just thinking in my head, ‘Joe, there’s no way that’s going to happen. Joe, you’re asking people for their email. They’re just going to exit out. That’s not going to happen.'”

Until it did. Discovery helped the Osthoff learn about their travelers’ intent, unveil who they are, and re-engage them around their interests.

In just ninety days, here’s what The Osthoff tallied. 📈

The pursuit of audience growth

At the point The Osthoff switched on Discovery, Adam’s biggest goal to follow revenue was audience growth. He shared,

“We didn’t really—even at that point—understand what it was going to do. We didn’t realize how many people were going to our website, and how many people we could genuinely open up a conversation with.”

Once Discovery was fully live, the resort was seeing incredible audience growth.

“Going in, I honestly thought we were going to get like eight percent [of unveils]. Last time we checked it was forty-one percent!”

It’s proof that engaging planners in better conversations around their intent, and bringing the principles of hospitality into the online experience drives better results.

Other insights from Discovery

On top of driving top line revenue, Discovery is giving Adam the real-time insights of travelers on The Osthoff’s site, including when travelers are looking to book. Those signals helped Adam identify previously unrecognized seasonal demand.

“We noticed that we had way more people looking at our website for dates that weren’t summer. We really didn’t think fall was a big thing for us. But we had a record breaking fall all of the sudden, because we found that there were really a lot of people searching for those dates.”

Adam was able to focus the efforts of his marketing team based on these learnings from Discovery.

“I now have data about when people are really looking to stay with us this year. I know that 40-ish percent of people unveil. If we just use some assumptive math, we can figure out the demand on our website. From a revenue perspective, that’s huge.

From a marketing perspective, I also know when people are shopping. I know what their booking window is. I know the dates they’re shopping. Most importantly, I have their email address to give them information about their shopping journey.”

The immediate takeaway from Adam’s bold new approach is if you do a really good job speaking to the individual interests of each traveler, you’ll likely be the top choice for their place to stay.

But Adam’s story doesn’t end here. Adam and his team took nurturing the extra mile—harnessing conversations with a warm audience to spark a huge return.

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Discovery was built to spark better conversations with travelers. And better marketing ultimately nets better results.

If you’re ready to reach, inspire and win over travelers with an approach that centered on authenticity and trust, give us a shout—we’re excited to kick off.

Since 2015 Woodloch Resort has been a power-user of the Flip.to platform, led by Director of Marketing, Rory O’Fee. He and his team have always felt that personal stories and authentic conversations are what resonate with travelers.

Recently, Woodloch implemented Discovery, and after only a short time, O’Fee and his team have been astounded by the results.

How did they end up with such a big bump in revenue and conversion? Let’s look further.

Family First

At Woodloch Resort, everyone is family. “We’re a family business that employs families that cater to families vacationing,” explains O’Fee. With thirty plus activities scheduled daily and inclusive meal plans, it’s easy to see why families are the number one draw to the 225-key resort. The property’s shores along Lake Teedyuskung, in the picturesque Pocono Mountains, are a wonderful place to make memories.

Marketing on Authenticity + Trust

Woodloch’s homegrown property management system has evolved over time, but is still limited for O’Fee’s marketing needs. When he first heard about Discovery, he knew it was a solve for many of his pain points.

“It’s the feeling you get when you come to Woodloch that leaves a lasting impression. That’s how we bring a family aspect into our marketing. We extrapolate those stories, and let people share their best moments,” says O’Fee.

Advocacy has been supporting that strategy for some time now in the dreaming phase. But O’Fee wanted to bring those tenets into focus on the planning phase.

“The Discovery platform has given us a new set of tools that I haven’t had access to previously. And that’s looking at traveler intent and interest—their timing interest, and their lead time to booking.

And being able to craft a message to talk to them, and help guide them through the booking process at the right time. That has been a wonderful tool for me, because I get to see when people are interested and looking. Then I can really shift my strategy accordingly.”

Intent: A Crystal Ball

That’s important for Woodloch, since its activities shift from season to season, maximizing fun in each. Winter’s snow tubing and “Winter Olympics” activities give way to spring and summer’s boating on private Lake Teedyuskung, nature walks through the mountains, and outdoor concerts.

Knowing a traveler group’s season of interest and mix of ages helps Woodloch continue the conversation further. It helps to connect them with the experience that helped win them over.

The Discovery Difference: Unveil + Re-engage

With Discovery, travelers unveil far earlier in the funnel than a traditional booking path. Once a planner unveils, Woodloch tapped the platform to nurture around the experiences for their age mix, save their plans until they’re ready to book, and most importantly, re-engage at the most appropriate point in the traveler’s planning stages.

It’s no secret that understanding more about their travelers drives Woodloch’s impressive increase in conversion.

The Future: Better Marketing

Overall, Rory is seeing a strong desire for families to reconnect post-COVID. Like any marketing effort, reconnecting with and growing audiences also means navigating challenges around privacy and compliance that will continue to be important to travelers in the future, often strained by fragmented policies at varying levels.

“To be in compliance with one thing, you’re out of compliance with another. It’s very complicated.”

But he’s optimistic about working through those challenges with Flip.to and people like Customer Success Team Lead, Michael Mathews.

“I know you’re going to grow, and come up with new solutions that will enhance the travelers’ experience. In doing so, you’re going to enhance the supplier’s experience in getting people booked,” said O’Fee.

“You’re working to change an element of the travel experience, and I’m excited to be a part of that.”

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If you’d like to stay in touch with Rory to hear more of his ideas on where travel marketing needs to be headed, give him a follow, here.

If you think Flip.to can help you have better conversations with your travelers, and in doing so, increase your conversion at the same time, we’d love to hear from you.