Founded in 1985, Travelodge is the UK’s first budget hotel brand and now operates nearly 600 hotels across the UK, Ireland, and Spain. Welcoming 22 million+ guests a year and with a diverse customer base—from business travelers to leisure trippers, spanning everything from family stays to hen-dos, couple getaways to solo travelers.
Travelodge’s personas each come with their own complex, individual, and channel preferences. They needed a customer engagement platform that could help them offer customers the same affordable prices across hotel stays for every occasion, but with premium, personalized guest experiences built into the customer journey. Previously, its legacy solution only joined the dots between SMS and email; they needed more than this. They also needed a platform that could help enhance cross-channel opportunities, extending to Web and App Push and WhatsApp engagement within the customer journey.
MoEngage has helped us unlock value in customer engagement by using real-time data and AI within the platform to drive automation where insights improve performance.
Travelodge understood it would need to build insight-led customer engagement, driven through marketing automation, to deliver the personalization needed at the scale it required. MoEngage’s AI-powered automation ingests primary information about a Travelodge customer—such as name, date of birth, city or location of their booking, type of traveler, stay type, new vs. returning vs. regular customer, for example—and builds out insight-led recommendations based on this primary persona information to automate engagement opportunities throughout that individual customer journey. For example, it might offer family-oriented versions of an email series to those traveling with children or serve a personalized offer for breakfast if a guest stays in a Bar-Café hotel but hasn’t yet made an F&B purchase.
Travelodge also built layers of data integration into the email journey to make the information sent to guests even more personal and helpful. For example, it built out Google Map IDs for the nearest train stations to its hotels, allowing it to offer door-to-door directions in one click.
By leveraging AI insights to optimize engagement, post-booking emails delivered a 58% open rate and 47% click-through rate (CTR), while pre-arrival emails saw a 72% open rate and 87% CTR. Pre-arrival app messages delivered a 61% open rate and 14% CTR, and web push notifications during the campaign generated 94.3k impressions.
Ultimately, while the email campaigns were focused on improving customer journeys rather than being focused on generating direct revenue, the improvement to customer experience they have created has been commercially successful, leading to a +354% increase YOY in post-booking email revenues. In H1 2024, Travelodge drove £4.3 million in post-booking revenues off the back of the post-booking journey optimization.
MoEngage and Travelodge Hotels also recently received Gold in the Marketing Automation category at the DMA (Data & Marketing Association) UK 2024 Awards. This is an excellent example of what successful partnerships between technology and consumer brands can achieve.
Travelodge and MoEngage continue to provide exceptional guest experiences for all Travelodge customers through personalized customer journey experiences that leverage data and automation.
