Gregg Blanchard
After doing a similar comparison for another CRM recently, I realized I should probably cover another alternative: TravelClick. Once again, I want be clear that we think TravelClick is a fantastic company. They do a lot of things really, really well. When shopping for a hotel CRM, however, we hear this question a lot about how we compaer to other solutions in the market and Travelclick is one of the most common we’re asked about. Either way, it’s good to realize that every platform is different and designed for different use cases.
Hopefully this quick article can help you understand some of those differences as you consider TravelClick alternatives or simply learn more about the market and how Inntopia Marketing Cloud fits into that.
TravelClick’s Strengths
TravelClick is part of a much larger ecosystem of tools, so there are often ways to bundle other products with your CRM to ensure roadmap alignment and perhaps even a discount on contracts. In terms of the CRM itself, TraveClick is great for standalone hotels where out-of-the-box options are enough for their needs. Because of this simpler approach, Travelclick typically falls on the lower end of the pricing spectrum and they can get folks up and running fairly quickly.
In other words, if you are a standalone hotel who doesn’t need a lot of customization with guest details or email marketing, TravelClick’s CRM is a great choice.
Inntopia Marketing Cloud’s Strengths
Inntopia Marketing Cloud was primarily built for more complex situations. For example, resorts where this are multiple systems that sell multiple types of products, multiple layers of data from a property that is part of a larger group of resorts, and more dynamic guests who have a diverse list of motivations for booking a trip to your property.
In that light, there are seven primary reasons to consider when assessing Inntopia Marketing Cloud as a TravelClick alternative.
Inntopia Marketing Cloud aggregates data from all your systems into comprehensive guest profiles.
1) Automatic Data Syncing & Householding from All Systems
This is the big one. Inntopia Marketing Cloud has the ability to aggregate data from all your systems automatically every night into clean, 360° guest profiles that are organized by household. That includes the PMS, POS, tee-sheet, etc. data you’re probably think of as we say that, but it also includes marketing engagement data, survey data, 3rd party data, etc.
2) Send All Emails from One Platform
Some more complex Travelclick users will manually upload lists from other systems into a tool like Mailchimp in order to send emails targeted around that guest data. Our ability to send customizable confirmation email, automated emails, and marketing emails from a single platform is something a lot of resort users mention.
3) Partnership vs Support
The biggest is the type of support you’ll receive. Instead of a support line, Inntopia Marketing Cloud clients work with a dedicated account manager from a team where the average hotel CRM experiences is well over 10 years. If you worry you won’t have time or skill to do it all yourself, this is important to consider.
4) Breadth of Integrations
Because we’ve solved the problems around data complexity, Inntopia Marketing Cloud can bring in a more more broad set of data. Which mean’s we’ve also built integrations for many more PMS, POS, marketing, survey, demographic, and other systems to create incredibly deep, insightful guest profiles.
5) Customization Options
Very little within the Marketing Cloud platform can’t be tweaked which allows us to really evolve with the specific needs of your brand whether that’s custom email templates or guest traits that are totally unique to your operation.
Inntopia Marketing Cloud allows you to customize everything, including booking confirmations.
6) Marketing Automation & Dynamic Content
We’ve led the hotel CRM industry in marketing automation and dynamic content for years, so much so we’ve written a book about more than 25 of the automations we help our clients with. We can reach any guest at any phase of the guest journey with a message neatly targeted to them based on the data you have in their profile.
7) Layers of Data
Finally, we’ve worked really hard over the last 5+ years on building in layers of data storage, access, and reporting so multi-property brands can track guest behavior across their locations and understand those trends on both the individual location and corporate level.
Summary
In other words, Inntopia Marketing Cloud is usually a better choice when you’ve got a complex guest, lots of data, and want to really customize your setup to perfectly match your needs and brand. If you’re a smaller, standalone hotel that’s fine with a more out-of-the-box solution? Travelclick is probably worth a look, especially if you don’t expect many support needs and need to save a few bucks.
As you may have noticed, TravelClick and Inntopia may seem similar but we’re built for fairly different use cases. So, yes, there is a bit of overlap between our ideal clients, but not as much as many folks think.
Learn more about Inntopia Marketing Cloud at the link below:
https://corp.inntopia.com/marketing/
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Tyler Maynard
SVP of Business Development
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Doug Kellogg
Director of Business Development
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