Case Study
NYX Hotels
“UpStay for us is about giving our guests a stay experience beyond their expectations.”
Nastya Mechetner – NYX Hotels
The Hotel: NYX Tel Aviv
Hotel NYX Tel Aviv is a luxury city hotel located in the very epicenter of one of Tel Aviv’s most prestigious neighborhoods. Featuring an impressive collection of luxury designer guestrooms, Hotel NYX Tel Aviv also boasts a wide range of amenities and service offerings that are each capable of elevating guest experiences and ensuring heightened satisfaction. These include access to the property’s scenic rooftop terrace, business lounge areas, a modernized gym and event spaces.
Visitors have direct access from Rothschild Boulevard to the financial center and Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, as well as to some of the most exclusive cultural attractions, such as Habima, Israel’s national theater, an abundance of fascinating museums, and the famous UNESCO designated “White City”.
There are also excellent sandy Tel Aviv beaches just a short walk away, upmarket bars and restaurants close by in the beautiful Neve Tzedek, and a new open commercial center by the name of Sarona which is definitely worth a visit. This enviable location makes NYX Tel Aviv the perfect choice for a leisure or business break.
Challenges:
As with many luxury hotel locations, NYX Tel Aviv earns its revenue by offering guests an elegant and superior stay experience. Only 40% of the guestrooms at NYX Tel Aviv are standard rooms. The other 60% are all upscaled premium rooms, presenting NYX Tel Aviv with the challenge of maintaining high occupancy rates while selling premium room offerings at the appropriate premium price.
Making matters more challenging in realizing the property’s full revenue-earning potential, the only opportunities NYX Tel Aviv previously had for upselling were upon the guest’s arrival or when the guest contacted them. This meant missed opportunities to increase revenue and extra concerns for front desk staff. With guests frequently arriving after a long journey, employee efforts to upsell also risked frustrating new arrivals who typically just want access to their room in order to relax and unwind.
The Goal:
NYX Tel Aviv sought to leverage UpStay’s smart platform to provide their vibrant mix of leisure, business and short-stay guests with personalized offers based on segmentation, individual interests and real time inventory of the hotel.
Recognizing that communicating with guests prior to arrival was the most effective and efficient means of promoting upsell offerings, NYX Tel Aviv clearly saw the enhanced value that a fully automated and AI-based system such as UpStay could provide.
Key to seeking to deploy UpStay is the platform’s proven capabilities in eliminating unnecessary workloads for frontline employees while automatically pushing relevant promotional offerings to each guest during a crucial time window when sales conversions are much more likely. UpStay is about hitting the sweet spot of giving guests timely insight into how they can create the best possible experience, and providing them with instant access to upgrades and services that they’re happy to spend extra on.
The Product:
With UpStay, NYX Tel Aviv quickly discovered that they could consistently predict conversion rates for guests opting to buy room upgrades via the UpStay partner’s panel.
During times when experiencing an increase in demand for their standard rooms/rates, the property can re-sell those standard rooms and even overbook them, knowing that enough guests will buy a pre-arrival room upgrade. This not only minimizes the risk of overbooking rooms in the real-world sense, but also ensures that premium room offerings are sold at the appropriate price point to maintain profitability. Further streamlining hotel operations, UpStay’s platform automatically makes any necessary adjustments within the PMS. This includes updating a guest’s room type and adding the extra charge for the upgrade to their folio.
With UpStay updating a hotel’s available inventory not just within internal systems but also on various booking channels, NYX Tel Aviv also eliminates the time-consuming and error-prone need to balance the house manually, potentially leading to a loss of revenue opportunities from their premium rooms. Over time, the pre-arrival upgrading charges created a considerable difference in revenue, with minimal time and effort on the part of hotel staff.
The Results:
Email open rate
Conversion rate of room upgrades
RevPAR increase
Boosting Upselling Performance
According to Nastya Mechetner who manages guest and front desk services at NYX Tel Aviv, UpStay has allowed them to catch fleeting opportunities to improve the guest experience, mainly through their best performing offers of room upgrades and breakfast buffets, as well as romantic spa treatments.
Since adopting UpStay, NYX’s Tel Aviv location continues to experience high performance from pre-arrival upselling emails, with an impressive ROI featuring a 14.7% conversion rate for room upgrades and other services. Further showcasing the effectiveness of UpStay is the property’s astonishing 78.5% email open rate, providing ample proof that guests are interested in learning what the hotel has to offer when communicated ahead of arrival.
“UpStay offers a proactive approach to using a hotel’s real-time inventory to enable guests to receive amazing value for a stay which is way beyond their expectations. That makes buying pre-arrival upgrades very attractive for the guests and the wait for their upcoming stay becomes much more exciting,” says Nastya.
Increased incremental revenue.
NYX Tel Aviv was pleased to report higher revenue from upgrades and extra items when offered via the UpStay platform. This also includes a considerable increase in upsell volume across the property’s various services and upgrade offerings.
Improved guest satisfaction
Nastya was pleased to report that in general, guests are positive about the pre-arrival emails sent to them. Many returning guests are calling in advance to ask when will they receive their pre-arrival email with available upgrade offers.
“Returning guests are anticipating getting UpStay’s pre-arrival offers, showing an amazing satisfaction from the value they capture through it, even before they start their vacation at our hotels.”
Reduced administrative tasks for front desk.
Nastya pointed out that UpStay is 100% automated, allowing frontline employees to re-focus their attentions and efforts on more immediate guest needs without jeopardizing opportunities to increase revenue. In addition to automatically sending offers, updating hotel inventories and ensuring that upgrade fees are appropriately billed, the system further sends either a confirmation email or notifies the guest in the event of unavailability.
Overview of guest interests.
An attribute that Nastya highlighted as particularly useful was the weekly and monthly reports in the UpStay Partner Platform, which gives them an overview of sales, which categories and items are doing well and which could be improved on. On a larger scale, this data, gathered over time, will provide valuable insight into their guests’ spending behavior and interests.
Customization to fit brand standards.
UpStay created a dedicated white label design to match NYX Hotels’ brand and style. The outcome is an email that looks and feels in line with the chain’s various other marketing materials. Coupled with personalized content, multi-language support and optimized timing, brings unmatched conversion rates and a positive guest response that maximizes hotel business revenues and reputations.