Voyat
Redefining the e-Commerce Experience

The movement toward direct bookings is gaining momentum in the travel and hospitality industry. In a marketplace crowded with online travel agents (OTAs), companies including large hospitality brands are looking to revamp their marketing strategies: direct channel booking helps hoteliers drive revenue and long-term success. In response to the market demands, Voyat, a New York-based e-commerce optimization company allows hoteliers to provide the best online experience, increase conversions, and decrease reliance on the OTAs through data-driven, personalized messages, served to the right audience at the right time. The Voyat platform creates a seamless brand extension that captures behavioral insights and user data, and turns them into personalized communications. The benefits are significant: elevated brand affinity, enhanced customer interaction and a more robust bottom line.

“We work with over 150 brands from large multi-national hospitality organizations to small boutique firms, and help them drive more revenue in the direct channel,” explains Benjamin Habbel, Founder and VP of Global Business for Voyat. The e-Commerce optimization platform is hassle-free and creates direct, immediate results. By rightly capturing the prime slots, Voyat increases web conversions by converting more of the visitors into guests for the hotel.

There are three significant facets of the Voyat platform—Direct Experience, Direct Membership, and Direct Insight. Voyat’s Direct Experience empowers hotels with the necessary tools to understand their customers’ behavior and serve dynamic messages to the right website visitor at the ideal time in the travel planning journey. Direct Membership drives conversion by providing special incentives to users who connect with the hotel’s brand via Facebook or email login. Voyat will soon be releasing an upgraded platform, which will allow hoteliers to personalize messages and offers based on the visitor’s travel intent. Providing relevant content to website visitors is increasingly becoming the standard in e-Commerce optimization: In a recent study by Infosys, 62 percent said they were in favor of receiving personalized offers and 86 percent said it influenced their purchases.

Our platform is hassle-free and creates direct, immediate results and a continuous guest retention loop for hotels

With the upgraded platform, Voyat creates a truly customized experience for the guest based on their travel preferences, where they are in the planning journey, and who they are as a traveler. On a more tactical note, Direct Insight gives users a clear picture around benchmarking and A/B testing reports as well Voyat’s proprietary knowledge of the industry around 150+ brands.

In a recent, notable example, the contemporary destination Beachwalk Resort, approached Voyat seeking to convert more direct online bookings to reduce margin-killing reliance on expensive OTAs. Beachwalk wanted to create a full-on vacation experience for customers, irrespective of the duration of their stay. To increase direct customer bookings the property worked with Voyat to offer a variety of food and beverage credit discounts based on particular on-site customer behaviors and data points. The result was a significant lift in conversion rate among the targeted audience, recapturing margin that far offset Beachwalk’s investment in the campaign. The bottom line: Voyat’s data science-driven platform delivered spontaneous results via custom-branded incentives based on the visitor behavior.

With a strong foothold now in the U.S., Voyat is well-positioned to expand into the European and Middle East markets. Commenting on the future plans, Habbel says, “With a new platform release in a few months, we will continue to develop innovative features and ideas that drive more revenue on the website through direct bookings.”