Tips
We often get asked this question, but before I jump in with an answer I want to be clear that Revinate is a great company with a great team that does many things really well. They’ve led many corners of the hotel industry into the CRM era. Yet we are an alternative that more and more resorts are looking at and this is a question that comes up regularly in sales calls, so I wanted to quickly answer this question and outline why, when choosing a a hotel or resort CRM, resorts choose Inntopia Marketing Cloud over Revinate or other, similar CRM / guest data platforms.
Our perspective on this based on what we hear from resorts and hotels who move to Inntopia Marketing Cloud from Revinate or who have used Revinate in the past and can compare the two platforms from first-hand experience, but of course this overview can’t cover every aspect of both systems.
First, let’s talk about strengths so we’re all on the same page. Similar to Inntopia, Revinate has been around long enough to really understand the industry and be known by many in the travel / resort space. Also similar to Inntopia, they have a handful of other products they can bundle with their CRM for the hotels who use their platform. One of their better-known pieces is reputation management.
In terms of their CRM itself, Revinate’s guest data and CRM tools are mainly designed for single hotels with basic data, integration and email needs. It’s not that they can’t work with more complex data, but it’s simply not how the system was initial designed. In other words, if you’re a standalone hotel or a property with simpler needs, Inntopia may not be a good alternative to Revinate’s CRM tools.
Let’s build on that last point as we compare these platforms. At the core, Inntopia Marketing Cloud was built for resorts and hotels with more complex, dynamic guest data and CRM needs. It’s not that Inntopia Marketing Cloud isn’t used by standalone hotels, but where we excel is when resorts and hotels want to go beyond a basic guest profile and integrate more data either on their own or as part of a larger ownership or management group. On the marketing side, if they want to go beyond basic email automations, templates, or campaign targeting then Inntopia Marketing Cloud is typically a better choice.
Let’s dig into a few of those features to consider when assessing Inntopia Marketing Cloud as an Revinate alternative.
One of the most important differences is that Inntopia Marketing Cloud can integrate with not just your PMS, but ticketing systems, spa booking systems, activity rental systems, etc. to aggregate guest data from across your property or resort. This also includes marketing engagement, survey results, and other guest data that you’d want to see along side other guest behavior. Anywhere your guests are interacting with your hotel either in person or online, Inntopia is built to bring in this data so that it is part of every guest profile.
Once we have the data, we have the travel industry’s most sophisticated and accurate data-merging system that can take all of those transactions, engagements, and insights about each guest and merge them into clean, accurate, householded guest profiles. These profiles allow you to see exactly what each guest does across your property or resort.
While other hotel CRM platforms like Revinate can access multiple systems to some degree, the quality of our data-merging and householding capabilities is consistently something hotels point to when they move to our platform.
It’s important to realize that any of those data points from any guest profile can be used to trigger automated messages. Whether that’s identifying a loyal guest, upselling guests who booked one thing but not another, or dozens of other behaviors, Inntopia Marketing Cloud’s marketing automation capabilities can reach your guest with targeted messages at specific moments during their journey.
This is another big reason hotels choose Inntopia over platforms like Revinate. Revinate can do the basics well, but isn’t always equipped to handle more advanced ideas, triggers, campaigns, and dynamic data fields.
Transactional marketing is sometimes lumped in with traditional marketing, but I want to separate it out because it’s such an overlooked aspect of what marketers could be doing with their guest data and CRM platforms. Want to customize a confirmation email with your own template and upsell the guest on things they didn’t include in their itinerary? You can do that and much more.
There are a few platforms like Revinate out there that do something similar, but none are able to bring the level of customization Inntopia can to transactional emails.
One of the most important differences between Revinate and Inntopia Marketing Cloud is our ability to group and partition data based on the levels, types, etc. of properties that are within the same management or ownership group as your property. At the highest level, leadership can look properties to see performance and guest migration across their properties. At the lower, individual properties can be limited to just their database.
And if you have multiple layers, our combination of permissions and tiers make it easy to serve up the right level of data access to every part of your organization. For example, you could allow the senior leadership team to look across all hotels, general managers to see smaller groups of hotels, and the marketing teams to only see their hotel’s guests and data.
To wrap this up Inntopia Marketing Cloud is usually a better choice when you want to see guest data across multiple systems, have more complex guest data needs, and want to customize your emails and database to perfectly match your needs and brand. If you have simpler needs? Revinate might be the better choice.
On the surface, parts of Revinate and Inntopia may seem similar, but as you can see above we’re really built for fairly different types of properties and use cases.
Learn more about Inntopia Marketing Cloud at the link below:
https://corp.inntopia.com/marketing/
Start selling more of everything your resort has to offer.
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