Through its patented pricing and merchandising engine (PRiME), Nor1 makes it possible to increase revenue through an improved and individualized upsell method by using tailored to-guest information to make both a price and product decision simultaneously.
Silicon Valley-based Nor1 is taking hospitality into the future focused on the intersection of Big Data, personalized commerce and guest experience. Using real-time decisions intelligence to predict a guest’s willingness to pay for a product and then making, in that moment, relevant and targeted offers to that guest; Nor1 is helping hotels worldwide to understand the power of upselling and how to use their rich data to better service the guests. It’s an enterprise approach that is helping global mega brands, like Hilton, Hyatt, Fairmont, Loews, and IHG to boost revenue and the guest experience from the point of confirmation all the way to check-in and throughout the guest’s stay.In 2012, Nor1 unveiled PRiME, the multi-patented pricing and merchandising engine that identifies which variables and interactions matter most when applying pricing and merchandising strategies to upsell offers. PRiME is able to, through a rigorous statistical process, sort and sift through millions of historical transactions, hundreds of guest-centric, property-specific, and reservation-specific variables to identify what matters most in product and pricing prediction. Simply put: PRiME’s true purpose is to maximize revenue for hotels while maintaining the rate integrity of their perishable inventories based on a scientific understanding of guest behavior coupled with transactional data. “Hoteliers that want to take upselling to the next level and want to be successful need to leverage a predictive analytics approach using resultant data and derived statistics to make dynamic, relevant and targeted offers,” said Jason Bryant Co-Founder and President of PRiME developer Nor1. “It’s not enough to add an upgrade feature to a booking solution. With PRiME, Nor1 uniquely offers a data-driven approach to upselling that enables hotels to standardize, grow and track upsells across their enterprise impacting marketing, revenue management, loyalty, and property operations.”Leveraging the power of PRiME are Nor1’s suite of upsell solutions that harness the data-driven offer sets at specific interactions with the guest such as post-confirmation, at check-in and even while at a property. The eStandby Upgrade, which is currently generating millions of dollars in revenue for hotels worldwide, is the company’s signature upsell product. One of the company’s founders, Art Norins, conceptualized eStandby, after spending many a night in a hotel hoping for an upgrade. He realized that on any given night, most hotels sit with 40% of their inventories unused, and that there was a tangible opportunity to help hotels sell that premium inventory and give guests a better stay experience.To date, more than 80 million guests have been exposed to eStandby Upgrade offers, which are delivered for the most part from the property via confirmation and pre-arrival email. With a consistent 20-30% of interested guests requesting to pay more for an upgrade, hotels have a real opportunity to channel that incremental demand into better customer relationships and long-term revenue.At check-in, PRiME powers the right offer, for the right guest regardless of the origin of the reservation. The FrontDesk Upsell gives hoteliers the opportunity to recoup some of the lost revenue from OTA bookings as well as develop a deeper relationship with their guests. The types of upgrades offered “for purchase” include room movements, restaurant offerings, spa offerings, or a decision to make no offering at a certain point in the guest experience. The ways in which the program modifies itself are infinite, based on each unique client.PRiME can make those decisions faster (in milliseconds), more consistently, and more accurately than staff can alone. However, while the PRiME decision intelligence engine is given room to make product and pricing decisions, it is designed to complement the hotel’s existing strategies, not overturn them.Airlines and other travel retailers are conditioning consumers to expect to pay for ancillary services but how do you keep guests interested, compelled and willing to pay more and more? PRiME uses another Nor1 patented, mathematical construct, The Loyalty Lattice that describes the cumulative experience of any given guest’s interaction with a Nor1 Solution. Every guest PRiME touches has a specific position on the Loyalty Lattice, and with each contact that position changes every time. PRiME uses the guest’s position on the Loyalty Lattice to estimate the likelihood of different behaviors at future touch-points with the guest. It helps PRiME decide what offer to make in order to induce the desired future behavior.Once there is evidence that a particular type of guest or a particular property is significantly different from existing models used to initialize a property, PRiME automatically produces a new model to target the specific property or guest type. Then, as even more data are accumulated, PRiME will automatically produce even finer-tuned versions of the guest type or property-specific models.Hoteliers should embrace scientific and mathematically driven technologies, like PRiME, that are truly intended to help them make better revenue management decisions before and after booking and to better know the customer, as business wisdom has always echoed. If there is anything to be taken away from this, it is to stay with the customer through every step of the guest experience. You never know when a small suggestion could make a big difference, in both revenue and loyalty.
