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Customer Profile

Recognised as one of the world’s leading hotel and leisure brands, Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, Inc. has a portfolio of over 1,200 properties across 11 internationally renowned brands in the world’s most exciting destinations. From city centre locations to relaxing resorts, Starwood provides the best in hospitality. Marriott International announced that it purchased Starwood in 2015, creating the world’s largest hotel company when the acquisition completed in 2016.

Campaign Objectives

Starwood and Sojern have worked together for over a year, running top-performing campaigns to drive direct bookings across the EMEA region. The teams wanted to take the partnership to the next level by testing programmatic media as a way to overcome one of their stickiest pain points: driving bookings for specific cities during temporary periods of lower bookings due to seasonal variances and other unforeseen events. “We struggle with ‘soft’ destinations, which are those locations that aren’t meeting our occupancy goals,” said Katerina Orfanidi, Associate Director of Tactical Marketing EAME.

In addition to filling rooms during difficult periods, Starwood was also concerned with keeping ‘spillage’ to a minimum—Starwood wanted people to book the destination for the ad they were seeing, and not a Starwood hotel in another, perhaps stronger, market. Sojern and Starwood agreed on a three-month campaign, a €3:1 ROI, and 35% of all EMEA bookings going to six specific cities experiencing such ‘softness’.

To further refi ne the lower funnel campaign goals, Sojern targeted in-market travellers from specifi c origin markets—driving them to book directly with properties in these six ‘soft’ cities.

Sojern’s Approach

If you aren’t using data to target the right person at the right time, they may book with your brand, but might not book the location or property you’re actually looking to fill—a problem when you’re looking to support softer markets. “People may see a banner ad to visit Prague, for example, but book a hotel in a completely different location,” explains Orfanidi, “The Sojern team used their predictive audience technology and specialised algorithms to find people who signalled intent to visit our target cities, serve them specific creatives and drive direct bookings to these cities and properties.”

Starwood

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Case Study

sojern.com / solutions@sojern.com

Sojern spent the first couple weeks of the campaign strategically monitoring which origin markets were performing best, and then optimised the campaign towards those markets throughout the duration of the campaign. “We can see if certain markets stop travelling as much, so we can experiment with new ones, being flexible and shifting budget,” continued Orfanidi. “We were able to maximise direct bookings and our marketing spend because the focus wasn’t on a set budget spend in a particular market.”

As a result, Sojern far exceeded the €3:1 ROI for five of the six destinations, reaching as much as €10:1 ROI in one of the cities. The team also came very close to reaching the ROI target in the sixth market, with an ROI of €2.6:1. Overall, Sojern generated more than €127,000 in direct booking revenue for Starwood from this campaign. “Sojern has been a great partner for us,” says Orfanidi, “Because we can target people who are looking to go to specific destinations, and drive direct bookings in only those particular locations”.

Katerina OrfanidiAssociate Director,

Tactical Marketing EAMEStarwood Hotels & Resorts

Worldwide

“Sojern has been a great partner for us. They present us with new ideas and market insights, and show us

how to use technology to make smarter marketing decisions. We’ve been able to target people looking to go to specific destinations, and

achieve our direct booking goals for those locations.”

Generated direct bookings over €127,000

Far exceeded the goal of €3:1 combined ROI, with some as high as €10:1

Worked below the spillage targets, with Sojern driving nearly half of the campaign’s total bookings to the six target destinations

Results & Findings

Creative Examples

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