Zach Stovall, Author at Flip.to Blog

Why better conversations with travelers lead to bigger successes for Plunge Beach Resort

Building an audience of like-minded folks is a top priority for 163-key Plunge Beach Resort. After all, as an independent hotel set in the lesser-known market of Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, the property would be remiss to rely on marketing efforts from the municipalities of Fort Lauderdale and Miami alone.

It’s sleek, surf-inspired design, and edgy restaurants make it an unexpected gem in its neighborhood, and while the resort provides the unique experience its guests seek out, it’s not in an obvious location where those specific planners tend to search.

With this in mind, the team at Plunge Beach Resort knew an owned audience opens up the opportunity to have better, more authentic conversations with future travelers, and to key in on a right-fit demographic for their hip beachfront hotel.

In doing so, the property is able to win over travelers with a higher return on investment than through traditional marketing alone.

Advocacy in the dreaming phase

Our team at Flip.to initially worked with Plunge Beach Resort to build and grow their audience through Advocacy. There, the resort is introduced to friends and family of their guests, which are a perfect demographic to consistently fill their marketing funnel.

Advocacy reaches the traveler at their point of inspiration, and opens a dialogue with the resort that’s nurtured by the platform to help these warm leads convert.

Discovery in the planning phase

Halfway through this year, the resort also began sparking conversations with travelers in another phase of the traveler journey—the planning phase. By switching on Discovery, Plunge Beach Resort aims to learn more about visitors who land on their site, ready to plan a trip.

Discovery unveils planners deciding where to go next, learns their intent and booking time-frame, and re-engages that traveler along their decision-making journey to help win them over for Plunge Beach.

In fact, whether that window is near-term or farther out, the platform helps the property re-engage at the appropriate time and with the right message to convert, all based on their intent. And it even helps extend a guest’s stay.

The results

Both parts of the Flip.to platform are performing swimmingly (pun intended!) for Plunge Beach, leading to a 137X return on investment. While the numbers speak for themselves, the biggest takeaway is that better conversations with travelers lead to better business for our partners.

A Destination Platform: How a collaboration 5 years in the making helped Condo-World and Visit Myrtle Beach put up big wins

One of the important aspects of collaboration is that—beyond being a sustainable strategy for growth—it grows to become a long term competitive edge.

We’ve seen this proven in Myrtle Beach. Now in a record-performant year after one of the fastest rebounds in the country, early collaboration was the foundation for their recovery.

We’re now 5 years in to the partnership. In lockstep with Alex Husner, CMO of Condo-World and newly elected Chair of the Board of Visit Myrtle Beach, we’ve seen the community soar.

We sat down with Alex to talk about the big wins both organizations have seen, including how the platform is driving their decision-making, a better path to conversion, and tackling their big rocks.

Early adopters

Condo-World and Visit Myrtle Beach agreed that having better conversations and more authentic relationships with travelers would naturally lead to better conversion. That led them to become early adopters of the platform.

“We all knew that there was a better way; a more personalized way to get guests along the funnel.”

Collaborative insights drives decision making

The insights gained from across the community l have helped everyone understand what’s making the most impact down to dollars. That has shaped marketing efforts in real time, and has led to exponential growth in audience and revenue.

Video 2: Flip.to for Visit Myrtle Beach: Collaborative Insights

“Through Flip.to we’ve been able to build one of the most sophisticated data structures of any DMO in the country.”

Winning over travelers

Whether in the dreaming phase, planning phase or booking phase, Flip.to helps Condo-World and Visit Myrtle Beach reach a high-quality audience, inspiring them with the right message at the right time in their traveler journey.

Video 3: Flip.to and the Traveler Journey: winning over dreamers, planners and bookers

“We’ve been able to use Flip.to to make more informed decisions on our advertising.”

Better conversations with travelers

A reimagined booking path, Discovery sparks conversations with planners on both sites in a more authentic way, building an audience, learning their intent, and winning them over. This, of course, leads to increased revenue.

Video 4: Discovery: Unveil & re-engage planners on your site, tracked to revenue

“We’ve really flipped the script on how abandonment works. We know there’s a lot of nurturing that needs to happen along the way, and through Flip.to we’re able to do that.”

Impact

The Flip.to platform is helping Condo-World and Visit Myrtle Beach grow an owned audience of travelers, enabling them to have better conversations with that audience, and following the impact of those relationships all the way down to dollars.

“Working with the Flip.to team could not be better. They’re passionate about what they do. They’re passionate about technology, but they’re also passionate about travel.”

And it’s working better than we could have dreamed. So far this year, we’ve helped earn and track $37 million across all of Myrtle Beach.

That’s on top of the high quality audience growth, and all of the other benefits of the platform— including a mission that’s been a sustaining factor for their travel industry: collaboration.

What a shift toward first-party data means for destination marketers

As the subject of online privacy makes daily headlines in news outlets around the world, destination marketers are taking note. Consumers are more aware of their online privacy, and the oft poor marketing tactics that threaten it.

Big tech companies like Google are committing to the strategy, declaring its intention to send third-party cookies the way of Flash.

In doing so, the tech giant is putting privacy first—though without completely leaving publishers and other advertisers out in the cold.

As marketers in the destination space ourselves, we’ve long been talking about marketing practices that needed to change, specifically in travel. Not in an effort to make marketing harder, but to make it better. Better for the traveler and better for business.

We’re happy to say that destination marketers are leaning in, with the privacy-first approaches centered on first-party data. We spoke to growth innovator and longtime destination marketer Scott Schult for his take.

As Scott shares and Google demonstrates, putting your audience and your community front-and-center is the core of a great marketing plan. Having better conversations with these people—as real people—and earning their trust is a well-regarded, privacy-first approach.

That turns into more meaningful insight which builds stronger business—so long as you protect your audience.

As our audience, we’re putting you first, too. We’d love to hear about the first-party data strategy your destination uses at zstovall@flip.to.

How Alden Suites accelerated to a more profitable rebound, all thanks to a warm audience

We aim to tackle marketing that’s both good for travelers and good for business, and we partner with industry players who do the same to drive more impact for customers.

We teamed up with NAVIS and the Sunshine Gals to boost the bottom line for Alden Suites Beachfront Resort, a 143-room property in sunny St. Pete Beach, Florida. Here’s a closer look at how the partnership set Alden up for a post-2020 comeback.

A competitive market

Marketing duo Sunshine Woodyard and Trudy Anderson of the Sunshine Gals are the conductors of Alden’s marketing, together with Alden’s VP of Operations, Tony Satterfield. He explains,

“The challenge with an independent hotel is not having that big brother that can feed you anywhere from thirty to sixty percent of your business.”

Like other independent hotels, the property elbows its way into market share in many of the same crowded channels as its peers.

Alden and the Sunshine Gals knew they needed a different approach. They wanted to talk directly to their audience, segmenting based on their wants and needs, and knew focusing on the guest experience over promotions would be a better way to engage their community.

The approach was successful, but they quickly found the need to scale, leading them to tap Flip.to and NAVIS. The partnership would grow the audience faster, and build traveler relationships across the traveler journey, tackling their goals:

Reach and inspire an audience of dreamers who are the perfect demographic
Unveil planners on their site, sparking new conversations in more authentic ways
Win over new and repeat guests, inspiring them to return again and again

Growth at every part of the traveler journey

Winning over planners and bookers

After 2020, Alden’s focus was to rebound more quickly and profitably by growing their direct channel. They turned to Flip.to, and we were excited to put to work the newest part of our marketing platform: Discovery.

Discovery unveils prospects on their site with a reimagined booking path, learning a planner’s intent and travel aspirations in a more authentic way. From there, the platform re-engages and nurtures prospects by sparking better conversations based on that newly discovered intent.

Switching on Discovery resulted in a leap in conversion, and a significant increase in direct revenue for Alden.

Letting won-over guests inspire a new audience of dreamers

After these guests have stayed, Flip.to steps in once again—this time with Advocacy. Alden turns their guests into storytellers, letting them share their experiences to grow a new audience.

They reach a highly-targeted, like-minded demographic who are dreaming about travel, before competitors even have the chance. Plus, these storytellers fuel other marketing. Woodyard shares,

“Flip.to lets us tell authentic guest stories throughout the traveler journey. People can see themselves at the property, living the vacation dream.”

The impact from Flip.to in the dreaming, planning & booking stages is massive:

Extending the traveler’s lifetime value

After working hard to grow and maintain this highly valuable audience, Alden Suites sought to maximize its impact, and that’s where NAVIS took the reins.

In order to build more fruitful, long-term relationships, NAVIS aims to increase its value, analyzing guest data, nurturing leads, and creating new or repeat direct bookings.

In doing so, NAVIS helps Alden Suites continue meaningful conversations with past guests, keeping their audience from going stale and ultimately priming guests to return.

This increases long-term revenue, creating growth that has been especially important after the challenges our industry has faced in the past year:

Teaming up for better marketing and better results

Marketing efforts with Flip.to and NAVIS proving effective through to revenue have helped the spirited team at Alden and the Sunshine Gals solidify their strategy:

“The partnership with NAVIS and Flip.to is a critical component of how we’ve been successful over the last several years,”

says Satterfield. And Anderson agrees:

“Our investment in building our own audience prior to COVID has made recovery work a lot better.”

Let’s talk

If you’re ready to hear how the Flip.to marketing platform can launch incredible impact for your property in weeks, get in touch. To keep up with more on what Alden Suites, NAVIS, and the Sunshine Gals are doing to reshape travel marketing, give them a follow:

We’ll share how you can reach, inspire and convert new audiences at a massive scale.

Wrappy Hour: The Latest Release Notes Wrap-up from 2020

Cheers for stopping in on another wrappy hour! Follow along for some big updates, new features and round it out with a bug smackdown.

Big Ticket Items

Spaces
We’ve streamlined your account with new navigation that makes it easier to flip between the hotels, groups or destinations that you’re helping to reach and inspire travelers. These new spaces also set the stage for some entirely new products.

Audience Onboarding & Invitations
Got an existing audience of past guests? Our new onboarding assistant can help you add them onto the platform with a few clicks. That tees up the next feature.

Your past guests are ready to become storytellers. The storyteller invitations feature helps target this audience, and sets them on personalized storytelling journeys that inspire future travelers, build brand loyalty, and strengthen your relationship with them.

Improved Attribution Tracking
Understanding the traveler journey is as important as ever. We’ve improved (and are on a never-ending quest to improve) the way our platform is helping the industry learn how to best win over audiences, and which paths are the most profitable.

Feature Updates + Light Enhancements

Announcement Feed
You deserve to know the latest and greatest about our products as soon as new features drop. We built an announcement feed into your account, so the news meets you where you are the most.

Sign-in Flow
Your new sign-in experience replaces cumbersome temporary passwords with a reset link, and displays password requirements so you’re logged in and back to work without raising your anxiety.

Account Permissions
We’ve added fine-grained permissions, so you can customize other users’ access to each area of our platform. Some of your team may need review-only status, while others need full access for modifications.

Azure Flattening & Angular Migration
Through a bit of backend string pulling, Azure flattening sets the stage for unaffiliated organizations to share content with each other. That allows DMO’s, brands and management groups to share content with their members more efficiently.

Our ongoing migration to Angular continues, which just means we’re able to build better and faster.

The Great Bug Smackdown 🐛

Story River
Our Story River should float guest stories downstream in every browser, but it didn’t for Internet Explorer. Now IE users can navigate the River as true explorers should.

Dark Mode
The dark side of Dark Mode left important parts of our emails in the shadows. We hacked a fix, and now they look great, even in the dark.

Duplicating Efforts
Duplicate emails are so annoying. Duplicate emails are so annoying. We fixed that.

Guest Certificates
Some logos were broken on guest certificate pages. That’s taken care of, and while we were at it, we made sure a certificate’s expiration date can be edited properly.

Thanks for joining our wrappy hour! If you’d like to know more about any of our new features, or you’d like a sneak peek, we’d be happy to take you for a test drive. Give me a shout at zstovall@flip.to.

How one vacation rental company’s audience helped them reopen with a bigger, warmer audience, ready to travel

Chances are you heard Florida’s beaches have reopened. Despite the initial 24-hour news bloviation, things seem to be normalizing, and the travel industry in the lightly affected panhandle of the state is ready to jump-start.

For Resort Collection, that means 1,000 rooms spread across the coast of Panama City Beach are ready to be enjoyed.

Thanks to a strong audience paired with a platform and strategy, they’ve hit the sand running. Here’s how.

Putting their own audience first

Most travel businesses experienced a “what’s next?” mentality as the pace of cancellations, refunds, staffing and financial decisions peaked. Even in the confusion and shock of the shutdown, Resort Collection had the clarity to realize this would pass.

Without normal channels of marketing, they knew reaching and nurturing their existing audience would be critical in the plan to reopen.

Striking the right tone

Keeping that audience in conversation during one of travel’s most challenging times ever would require empathetic outreach and careful messaging.

The Flip.to platform played a critical role, helping more than two hundred people share their stories with Resort Collection at the center during the pandemic-induced downtime.

It’s those storytellers who are so important to the company’s strategy. These are real people who shared authentic moments, and in doing so, introduced the VR company to a community that trusts them the most: their own friends and family.

The audience responds

The response was phenomenal, and grew the collection’s audience even wider. Beyond scale, these trusted connections were with a new, high-quality audience of like-minded individuals who mirrored the original storytellers—the right-fit audience for Resort Collection.

Now in active conversation, this new audience is primed as Resort Collection excitedly takes its first steps forward in more than a month.

Authenticity and trust make better marketing

Resort Collection immediately noticed the stories generated by using the platform resonated with their audience.

How? For starters, they saw a spike in engagement and conversion, a testament to better conversations that are meaningful, timely and appropriate—all at a moment when people are deciding how and when they will be ready to travel again.

The platform put happy times at the front of mind for Resort Collection’s new and old audience alike.

As they’re phasing back into operation, the platform is now helping the collection immediately start welcoming this warm audience to their newly reopened properties.

And as units book and first guests arrive, they, too, will become storytellers, continuing to grow Resort Collection’s audience, and seeding the funnel in the same way.

Resort Collection recognized the most important lesson in the pandemic: keep your audience at the center. Sparking the right conversations with that audience, and nailing timing and tone are incredibly important.

By prioritizing these efforts, when the time is right for both your properties AND your audience, they’ll be there for you.

How collaboration helps these small Key West hotels see spectacular results that will live beyond the pandemic

Tucked among tropical foliage, and in the company of buzzing scooters and free-range chickens, eight boutique properties scatter the eclectic neighborhoods of Key West. The inns, B&B’s and small hotels are each unique except for a theme of pastel hues and a proximity to Ernest Hemingway’s favorite watering holes.

Yet each was looking for a way to attract more travelers within the country’s southernmost vacation outpost.

At the time, their parent company, Riley Hotel Group, ran all eight as a collection, but marketed the properties individually. And one big opportunity stood out: collaboration.

A platform to work together

When Riley switched on the Flip.to platform, our teams worked closely to not only reach and inspire a bigger audience, but also to build an overall plan to help all eight hotels collaborate.

In those conversations, Flip.to Account Manager, Joseph Meuse, also recognized the need to speak to travelers with a unified voice and to build awareness of the other hotels in the family. That suggestion garnered more fuel to continue evolving The Key West Collection by Riley, a plan that grouped the boutiques together in strategy, marketing and content, and would introduce the sister properties to travelers who previously knew no affiliation.

Riley the Rooster debuted as the hero of the new logo, and excitement built for the official kickoff of the platform.

A launch and a pandemic

Photo submission from April A. showing man holding a rooster and a hen. — Photo submission from April A.

Just when the new brand started to take off, the bottom fell out of the market as the pandemic swept the nation and grounded travel. While excitement deflated quickly, the groundwork from the collaboration proved to be timely.

The eight properties in the Key West Collection are now working together on a single Flip.to platform to inspire an audience of travelers, and rebuild their marketing funnel while the island is shuttered.

Their audiences, once compartmentalized, are learning about the group in a more authentic way. They’re also growing a team of storytellers who are actively introducing their friends and families to the entire collection. That sets up the properties to be in a great position when the time is right.

The impact of collaboration

The introductions are adding up at a brisk pace. That’s no small feat considering the collection only counts a total of 105 rooms.

Their marketing team is adding great value at the moment, which is bringing The Key West Collection by Riley more than 3,600 dreamers that they can speak to until the Hemingway daiquiris are flowing again.

An extension of your marketing team

Flip.to and Joseph proved to be an extension of The Riley Group team, and a partner willing to join in thinking big to overcome its challenges. Neither could have foreseen the biggest challenge to date, but those initial conversations show getting the fundamentals right is the best way to weather any storm.

How 3 properties are adjusting their marketing during the pandemic, and how you can too

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less,” stated Nobel prize winning physicist and chemist, Marie Curie.

COVID-19 has thrashed our industry. The challenges are great, but the decisions and adjustments made today will ultimately decide the future as our industry emerges into a changed world.

As Curie suggested, the more information we have, the better positioned we are to do that. (As you’ll read below, wine also helps.)

When traditional marketing isn’t an option

At Flip.to we’re working hard to help our customers understand, strategize and adapt. The goal is to set the stage for the most profitable rebound while resources are limited.

With traditional marketing off the table, it’s critical to maintain a relationship with your audience of travelers, or risk degradation, with your audience ‘going cold’.

As properties continue to grow that audience for the time when travel is back, it’s equally important it’s done in a way that builds relationships and avoids missteps.

How our customers are adapting

Our Account Management team is working with customers on the platform to maintain and grow these audiences during downtime—in the right way.

Take a peek at some of those stories in action, and check back for more in the coming days and weeks.

STONEWALL RESORT

Roanoke, West Virginia

With travelers grounded at home and cabin fever setting in, Stonewall Resort launched a Flip.to campaign called “Travel Buddies,” asking their audience to share stories of adventures past with a favorite companion.

The platform rekindles the feelings surrounding those memories while making authentic connections with the storytellers and audiences they’re reaching.

Beyond maintaining their current audiences, Stonewall Resort aimed to reach a new, wider audience so that they could build a funnel of conversations to tap into when the time is right.

They invited anyone to share a ‘Travel Buddies’ story, even if they hadn’t visited in the past. Growing their team of storytellers exponentially increased the impact they earned.

In fact, the 208-room resort has been introduced to 608,438 friends and family directly by their storytellers in the first 3 weeks starting March 24th—all reached organically.

That adds up to fourteen times more than their already healthy audience of existing followers and fans, and is a great set of travelers to engage more down the line.

THE GUEST HOUSE AT GRACELAND

Memphis, Tennessee

Elvis Presley fans can’t help falling in love with The Guest House at Graceland’s “Taking Care of Business” campaign.

By sharing memories from a past visit to Graceland or The Guest House, past guests can play along with The King. For those feeling lonesome tonight, the Guest House also welcomes stories from anyone sheltering in place, even if they have never visited Memphis.

It’s a playful approach that has a new audience professing their burning love with stories.

Elvis fans are passionate. And since kicking off April 1st, in two weeks The Guest House has been introduced to an audience of nearly 250K by their storytellers.

Beyond that, they’ve earned almost 2,000 warm leads. These are the friends and family of storytellers now in conversation with the 450-room property thanks to the platform—helping to be present and useful to those dreaming about getting back to travel without the pressure to ‘buy now’ weighing on their suspicious minds.

HARVEST INN

St. Helena, Napa Valley, California

If the best memes of the pandemic are any indication, wine has played an important role in the national mood. A hectic reality resulting from school closures and working from home, colloquially referred to as “WFH,” has made the product of the vine an even more popular stress reliever.

In their “An Enchanting Slice of Napa Valley” Flip.to campaign, the Harvest Inn introduced a playful spin on WFH—Wine From Home. The invite calls on wine lovers everywhere to share their best moments of enjoying wine from wherever home may be.

The platform is introducing wine-lovers the world over to both Napa Valley and Harvest Inn. So far, to the tune of 88,933 friends and family, and thousands of new conversations with future travelers.

For a property with only 74 rooms, this is helping grow an audience of dreamers at a time when the power has been effectively cut to the “book now” button.

Until travel is ready, the platform is in conversation with the right content and context, leaving Harvest Inn with an audience primed for planning and booking later on., That audience is a wine-loving demographic, which is a great fit for Harvest, and earned at the lowest cost.

Inspiring your own audiences

When putting together your strategy, remember it’s important to empathize with your audience. Travelers share your concerns (and probably disappointment that their plans are on hold).

Here’s some of our take:

Include what makes your destination unique (wine, beach, Elvis, etc.)
Make sure the call-to-action is broad enough to reach the widest audience
Inject personality and lighten the mood, but take care to be empathetic toward the difficult situation many face
Have someone from your team kick off the campaign with a homemade video

As always, even remote, our AM team is here to help. We all need to be prepared for the moment the economic engine starts to rumble back to speed.

Wrappy Hour: Your Release Wrap-up from 2019

As you’ve probably seen, we may have dropped the ball on our blog. Excuses aside, we have at least one good reason: we spend a lot of time building product that’s damn good. Product that’s helping travel marketers of all sorts win over new audiences, and knock down their goals.

And we’re getting better all the time, too. We haven’t brought to light these updates nearly enough, but hey, much like our blog—new year, new us! 🎉

To kick-off, we’re recapping all the enhancements we made last year. Plus, be on the look out here for more updates to come—it’s one resolution we’re here to keep.

Our ‘Big Rocks’

We’ve broken out the pneumatic equipment to improve our platform—meant to fundamentally change our business—and yours.

We’re counting your dollars—even better
We set up new plumbing to more accurately attribute referral links down to revenue. It sounds like a basic update, but it’s truly game-changing.

We’re migrating to an all new Angular
We’re updating the infrastructure of our account (and eventually to our wider platform) to the newest version of Angular. If you don’t know what that is, you’re not alone. Google’s development framework simplifies our coding process, letting us build infrastructure faster and with fewer obstacles. And it’s kind of a big deal.

Feature updates & light enhancements

We’re also finding ways to make the features you know and use even better. When your life is easier, ours is too.

Even faster onboarding
As a new customer, you can get running at full speed now in a matter of days thanks to some process updates that lessen the workload for our account managers.

Data parse improvements
It’s now easier and more comprehensive to get import data into our platform. Hooray for data parse, as they say.

Better reporting
When you want to dig into the details, reports are the place to go. In this update, they got some much-needed house cleaning. Names, definitions, and data calculations are now more consistent, giving you more precise data.

(Even more!) Better reporting
We restructured our reports to provide a better look at audience segments on our platform. So it’s faster and easier to get to what (and who) you need.

URLs that say what you mean
The ten-character limit for shortened URLs has been increased to fifty. Now we can set up a link like http://go.flip.to/you-can-name-it-this-long-but-use-some-restraint. Go ahead and channel your excitement in URL form.

Put your stories to work, even easier (and see their impact, too)
See every bit of impact from every story, with a new look that’s even more insightful. Put your stories to use in a big way by broadcasting them in a snap.

💡 Recommendations from your neighborhood AM
Be on the lookout for recommendations hand-selected just for you by your friendly, recommendation-wielding account manager.

Stories, queued up
We made it easier to access the queue of stories that need curating. Just click the button called “Start curating” in the Library.

Bugs squashed 🐛

Based in Florida, we’re used to dealing with some pretty horrifying bugs. While we can’t always keep them out, we’re quick to swat them down. Here are a few we put the kibosh on in 2019.

Letting Angular young-and-old play nice
Some <a>s were updated to <button>s so our version of Angular plays nice with others.

Bubbling up your best stories
Sometimes our logic was butting heads, causing story randomization to be not so random. Story River, Explorer, Invitation page, and Confirmation Experience now show a better mix of stories.

Social channels are (constantly) changing—so we are, too
What can we say? Our travelers like sharing to all of their audiences, and we plug into the major platforms to make that possible. As those platforms make structural changes and release updates, it’s easy for bugs to creep in. When they do, we stay on top of it to make sure they don’t hang out for long.

Wrappy hour is officially a wrap! Thanks for stopping by, and be sure to follow our continued updates. Next time you find yourself in Florida we’d love to grab a coffee IRL. Cheers to 2020!

Blog? What Blog?

Hey blog reader! It’s been a while. Too long, perhaps.

It seems there’s always a reason…

“I’m busy building product.”
“I’m busy getting things Geetha-approved.”
“We have a blog?”

I set out to find out exactly why we haven’t updated this space recently, (completely unannounced, perhaps against their wills, and without even the most perfunctory duties of a stylist or paid hair/makeup professional.)

Here’s what they said.