Sonesta Hotels officials take pride in touting their Sonesta Travel Pass complimentary rewards program. What’s more, they offer a summer sweepstakes from June through Sept. 30, 2017, to engage customers about their loyalty program.
Sonesta Hotels is offering its biggest loyalty program prize ever: One million Sonesta Travel Pass points.
The sweepstakes include two round-trip airline tickets for travel to any Sonesta destination within the U.S. and the Caribbean. In addition to the grand prize, an additional 1,000,000 Sonesta Travel Pass Points will be awarded in first prizes as Sonesta celebrates a summer of growth for the company.
Scott Weiler, vice president of marketing and communications at Sonesta Hotels, talked to Loyalty360 about the company’s main summer attraction.
“In the four years since we re-launched Sonesta Travel Pass, we have seen incredible growth and tremendous engagement from our most active members, especially our Elite members,” Weiler explained. “We developed this promotion to help spread the word on Sonesta Travel Pass and Sonesta Hotels in general. We expect to see a very large number of past Sonesta guests that are not yet members to enroll in Sonesta Travel Pass as a result of the promotion. We also expect to see a spike in engagement from our population of Sonesta Travel Pass members that are less frequent visitors.”
What makes this promotion unique?
“It is unique for Sonesta,” Weiler said. “We’ve never given away this many points before, or this many opportunities for both new and past guests to win a free trip to one of our amazing hotels or resorts.”
Sonesta surveys its customers regularly.
“We believe very strongly in listening to our guests, and especially our Sonesta Travel Pass members,” Weiler said. “We survey our members regularly, and that can be to benchmark attitudes and opinions, capture opinions on new benefits or other new concepts, or to get a pulse check on a question or topic. But in addition to surveying our members, we also learn a ton from the listening channels in our ‘voice of the guest’ program–including online reviews, member care, and our hotel staffs.”
How would you describe the state of customer loyalty and what plans does Sonesta have for the rest of 2017?
“While there is much said about the rate of change in customer loyalty right now, in particular driven by millennials (and soon post-millennials or gen Z), the fundamentals that create a stronger likelihood for particular consumer to choose a brand over another are no different than they have ever been,” Weiler added. “At Sonesta, our hotels must provide the services that our guests need while delivering a human, personal, authentic experience that hopefully makes them feel amazing. When we do that, our guests will always choose us first when their travel needs coincide with one of our locations. Other than more promotions to help us get the word out on Sonesta and Sonesta Travel Pass in 2017, we have a number of really cool technical projects underway that are primarily focused on dramatically enhancing member engagement.”
Consumers can enter the sweepstakes by going online to: www.Sonesta.com/WhereWouldYouGo. The promotion is open to new and existing Sonesta Travel Pass members. All enrolled members can also earn an additional entry by booking and completing a stay during the promotion period by September 30, 2017.