At the other end of the market, however, stand alone boutique hotels or small groups of hotels cannot rely on being in the right place at the right time at the right price. They present an experience-rich offering to guests that requires a more sophisticated marketing effort. Increasingly they are turning to CRM solutions developed for the hospitality industry to deliver on this need.

Leading the way in providing this service are Amateo, who have a developed a unique Guest Relationship Optimisation package for the hospitality sector. It combines a reporting portal that highlights occupancy and revenue trends as well as modules that automatically manage marketing campaigns and loyalty programs. Amateo have seen significant demand for their services amongst boutique hoteliers.

"CRM is seen as the domain of large organisations who wish to have a unified view of a customer no matter where they may appear around the world. We have proven for global hotel customers already the vast return on investment that CRM brings to them" stated Matthew Maxwell, ceo of Amateo.

"A trend that surprises some analysts, however, is the huge demand amongst small groupings of hotels or even individual luxury hotels for our solutions. Looking at this demand, however, the reasons for it are easy to understand: these hoteliers are acutely aware of the importance of capturing information about guest preferences and profiles.

"In the case of individual hotels, they want to be able to use this information to tailor their guest offering in a way that encourages repeat business, and reward guests for their loyalty," explained Mr. Maxwell.

"On the other hand, for small groupings of luxury hotels the goal is often to cross-sell bookings at other hotels to guests of one property. This has proven to be an extremely cost-effective approach as there is a significantly higher propensity to stay with a luxury hotel where a past experience has been favourable".

The final reason why Amateo has developed demand for CRM where others said it couldn't be achieved?

"It's a pricing issue", concludes Mr. Maxwell "We have struck a balance between the sophistication of the solution we have developed and the return on investment it generates that appeals to the luxury end of the market".

Amateo are leaders in Marketing Automation and Business Intelligence solutions for the hospitality sector. Amateo's Guest Relationship Optimisation product suite standardises historical guest data stored in multiple hotel property management systems and facilitates revenue generating applications including Amateo 360 (Marketing Campaign Automation), Amateo Portal (Reporting and Analytics) and Amateo Affinity (Loyalty/ Executive Club Schemes).

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