Hyatt Dining Club is a personalised membership and loyalty program designed to offer curated experiences to guests across India. It is an initiative by Hyatt Hotels Corporation, a global hospitality company with 20 premier brands and more than 900 hotels around the world.
The Business Challenge
Hospitality is one of the fastest growing industries in the world, and also one of the most competitive ones. In order to stay ahead of the curve, and foster growth and expansion, it has become imperative for businesses in the hospitality sector to leverage the power of technology and build smart digital solutions.
Hyatt, a premier hotel chain, wanted to leverage our expertise in the hospitality and tourism industry to build a dining club platform. The idea was to provide functional, psychological and financial value to guests, garner strong guest loyalty and encourage repeat patronage.
‘Would our guests like a bottle of wine or a cake on-arrival? Or do benefits like a rejuvenating spa treatment or a complimentary suite upgrade are more in line with our guests’ preferences?’
Point-based reward models have become antiquated. Our client wanted to provide a more personalized surprise and delightful experience to their valued guests.
The challenge was to translate their business idea into a robust, secure feature-rich web application.
Hyatt Dining Club: A Digital getaway to delightful experiences
With the proliferation of smart devices and rapid advancements in technology, our client wanted to adopt a mobile-first strategy. The idea was to enhance relationships with valued guests by building a digital getaway for exceptional experiences and making the membership program more accessible and streamlined.
Our client wanted to establish a strong brand image by offering guests incentives for repeat business, such as free upgrades to suites, complimentary rooms, free bottle of wine, starters, cakes and bonus rewards on every stay. The concept behind the membership program was to provide guests a more personable visit and flexibility to choose their own reward packages.
We developed a highly-interactive, easy-to-use web application that provides people a truly digital experience and access to exclusive rewards pan-India.
Understanding the Requirements The Why and How
Our team at ISHIR deployed critical solutions to address our client’s unique challenges. We evaluated the performance of our client's existing solution developed by an agency and encountered major loopholes, such as loosely written code and issues with compliance and data security.
The existing solution was solely dependent on support. After identifying the major pain points, we automated processes and laid the framework for a robust and secure solution, with minimum dependency on the support team.
We commenced the process by asking questions pertinent to the project:
- Is the membership program merely capturing guests who stay and spend more often?
- Is the program solely designed to attract people who are hotel’s frequent guests?
- Are we trying to change guests' behaviour to avail exclusive benefits and spend more?
These set of questions got the ball rolling.
We concluded with the following insights about the proposed solution.
- We used data to our advantage and identified programs and unique offerings for the guests. The intent was to provide diverse offers to ensure there was something for everyone. Users can choose from a range of exclusive personalised packages that suit them the best, for instance, ‘Pamper Me’, ‘Suite Life’, Food Fanatic’, and ‘Life of the Party’.
- We analysed and identified key customer segments that responded positively to the membership program. To streamline everything and provide an optimum experience, we revamped the entire app and increased the modules from 3 to 18.
Design Phase
It was time to leverage these insights to optimize our clients marketing efforts and strengthen the membership program.
To kick off user research, we conducted user interviews to get a better understanding of the types of travelers’, their goals and pain points.
To visualize and better understand our target users’ attitudes, we created empathy maps which helped us fill any gaps in our knowledge.
We created customer journey maps to illustrate the steps that the users will undertake while interacting with the solution. This was done to highlight users’ pain points and focus on minimum clicks for an effortless user journey.
After getting a strong handle on what guests loved, we then worked it into the program. Flexibility to choose their own personalized service was a key differentiating factor for users.
Project Challenges
There’s undeniably a number of challenges and a lot to consider when building a dining club based app. This includes complete bifurcation of hotels, restaurants and services, reporting on the revenue model, regular security audits and adherence to regulatory compliance.
Development Challenges
We followed the best project management practices. Our remote agile teams worked in a 2 weeks sprint to ensure that all project milestones were met in the stipulated time. The idea materialised into a membership based web app built on Laravel and MongoDB.
We developed a robust admin panel to streamline operational efficiency with modules ranging from Customer Management, Spa management, Restaurant management, booking, offer management, referral management to hotel management. The solution also included a built-in waiter dashboard, advanced analytics for financial and operational reports, modules for support and bulk purchases, and much more.
The web app keeps track of members’ requests and preferences on a database to offer a personalised touch and make the program memorable for users. Whether it's spa treatments or food preferences, when a guest signs up on the dining club app, their preferences are all recorded in member profiles.
The web portal also generates personalised offers and code benefits to provide users the best possible value.
The value we delivered
We accomplished all project goals by creating a robust, secure, feature-rich web app that streamlines operations, is easy to manage, and improves the overall customer experience.
The Hyatt Dining Club membership program generated measurable gains for our client in direct bookings and revenue, and increased the lifetime value of their guests drastically. It also demonstrated a notable increase in patronage in less than a year.
Client Testimonial
The Hyatt Dining Club membership program
generated measurable gains for our client in direct bookings and revenue, and increased the lifetime value of their guests drastically. It also demonstrated a notable increase in patronage in less than a year.
-DAVID JOHNSAN
The Hyatt Dining Club membership program
generated measurable gains for our client in direct bookings and revenue, and increased the lifetime value of their guests drastically. It also demonstrated a notable increase in patronage in less than a year.
- Kris Gethin