Today’s resorts face a massive problem: the broken booking journey.
For years, resorts have been forced to use distinct, siloed systems to manage and sell their unique experience-based inventory. As a result, guests have endured frustrating, disjointed booking journeys when planning their on-property stay, having to book experiences such as restaurants, pool cabanas and event tickets using disconnected websites, apps and analog channels.
This subpar experience leads to resorts missing extraordinary revenue opportunities.
At UrVenue, we knew this problem could not be solved by one company alone. It required collaboration between technology companies and hospitality brands with a passion for innovation and a shared vision of reinventing the guest experience.
Luckily, we found that partnership with OpenTable to launch the Itinerary Builder: a unified booking solution that transforms how guests engage and transact with a resort’s direct channels.
This industry game-changer enables resorts to offer any live inventory with one booking interface, one shopping cart, and one transaction.
“We’ve seen first hand how frustrating it can be when guests need to use multiple systems to book a variety of property experiences,” Mitchell Zak, Head of Product at UrVenue. “The beautiful thing about the Itinerary Builder is that it provides a single front-end for guests to book, while integrating with several operational back-ends including our own venue management solutions, allowing resorts to tailor their tech stacks to their needs without sacrificing the guest booking experience.”
Resorts can immediately benefit from:
- Increased bottom line with revenue management and yielding
- Greater share of advance bookings and payments leading to reduced no-shows
- Consolidation of the technology stack to reduce costs and improve data integrity
- Integrated guest and booking data across outlets, properties, brands, and enterprises
- Robust flexibility to package/bundle or charge à la carte with myriad payment/booking options
- New opportunities to optimize upselling/cross-selling with enterprise-scale analytics/insights
Now resorts can consolidate all of the booking solutions used by their outlets, from dining, nightlife, and entertainment to pools and amenities. This provides powerful revenue opportunities to cross-sell, upsell, package, and bundle live inventory with dynamic pricing on any channel, including websites, mobile apps, kiosks, chatbots, in-room devices, 3rd party resellers, and concierge or call center systems.
“We are currently monitoring the success of UrVenue’s Itinerary Builder,” said Kerry Osborne, Senior Enterprise Relationship Manager at UrVenue. “Since our deployment earlier in 2021, we have seen on average a 15% increase in booking values, in part due to the successful cross-selling of resort experiences.”
With the Itinerary Builder, resorts can get creative with traditional and non-traditional inventory to offer new guest experiences while leveraging innovative revenue models such as packaging and bundling to optimize their bottom line.