Edwardian Hotels London
Edwardian Hotels London worked with Cvent to build their sales and marketing efforts, increase demand, customer experience and increase revenue.
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INTRODUCTION
Founded by Jasminder Singh in 1977, Edwardian Hotels London is one of the UK’s largest independent companies as well as a leading luxury hotel and hospitality brand. Having used Cvent for several years, last year they took a step back and reviewed opportunities within Edwardian with Cvent solutions.
Edwardian have twelve properties including the May Fair Hotel in London and the Edwardian Hotel in Manchester. Their mission? To deliver an exceptional experience for their guests, in the UK’s capital and beyond.
Across all hotels, they offer 130 meeting rooms and 3000 bedrooms and host a variety of events from sporting to tech. In addition, their Heathrow property, Radisson Blu Edwardian is certified to host healthcare sector meetings. With award-winning kitchen concepts, restaurants and bars, the venue is a favourite among event planners.
THE CHALLENGE
Running a successful MICE operation involves many moving parts. Marketing, sales and operations teams must work together to not only ensure the hotel is getting the business it needs, but to maintain optimal customer experience. Hasnain N. Alloo, the Commercial Director for Edwardian Hotels London said: “The approach we took was amalgamating three areas; you have the sales side of it, you have the marketing side of it and then you have the revenue. Then how do you amalgamate all three areas in order to achieve the budget you want?”
Edwardian Hotel’s main challenges involved bringing more MICE business to the hotel, increasing number of inquiries they were receiving and improving their performance in terms of response times and conversion. They also needed a clear way to analyse their performance with access to data and teams to support.
Searching to generate more enquiries, improve and streamline their RFP process and then continuously analyse and optimise their performance across the board, Edwardian reassessed their opportunities alongside the solutions Cvent provides.
THE SOLUTION
Edwardian Hotels chose Cvent Marketing and Business Intelligence products to help achieve their goals with impactful results. Using Diamond Ads, Microsites and Business Intelligence, specially, Alloo notes three areas that have provided strong ROI: “The response in terms of the number of RFPs have increased. The demand to our properties has increased over 50%, as far as RFPs coming in. But it has also given us an insight of all of the areas that we had leakages; on distribution and disconnect between the venue and the event organisers.”
By using Cvent’s marketing tools and Business Intelligence, the hotel saw a 53% increase in total RFPs YOY. They also saw an increase in unique RFP value of 60% YOY and an increase in awarded RFPs by 33% YOY.
Part of the success the hotel saw has come from working closely with the Cvent team. “I’ve got a saying with my team: if we don’t speak to the Cvent team four times a week, there is a problem.” Utilising the data analyst teams and their account manager, has helped them see an immediate return in demand generation. They’ve also been taking full advantage of training opportunity by getting their meeting and events teams fully trained on the Cvent system. “Any time we call, they are there to help us in order to aide us to convert and generate demands from meeting planners.”
The real value to Edwardian Hotels is their access to data: “We value data,” said Alloo. “Cvent gives you a 360 opportunity to analyse all the data from RFPs to see the opportunities you are missing. But also, on bid rates. Our bid rate was down 10% to where we are currently. We started increasing bid rates and saw better impacts on revenues.”
“As distribution evolves within meetings and events, Cvent provides all the technologies available to bridge the gap between hoteliers and meeting planners.” - Hasnain N. Alloo, Commercial Director, Edwardian Hotels London
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