Gabríela Rún Sigurðardóttir
Marketing Manager, Keahotels
About Keahotels
Keahotels is a leading hotel brand in Iceland, operating ten hotels across the country in key destinations including Reykjavik, Akureyri and Vík. Keahotels welcomes international and domestic travelers with modern comforts and amenities, enhanced with a touch of Icelandic charm.
Background
Iceland’s travel landscape is highly competitive, and becomes even more complex when you add in factors like recent volcanic eruptions, which have halted travel plans and caused hotels to miss out on bookings. In this challenging environment, hotels need to be prepared for anything. Keahotels in particular is able to stand out from its competitors and thrive in uncertain times by maintaining a strong promotional calendar and focusing on offers and events at its properties. However, in the past the team has struggled with the visibility of these offers on its direct booking website, where they feel it can be difficult for potential guests to land on their promotional pages.
The solution
Keahotels has been able to use Triptease’s website personalization tools, alongside other marketing channels, to drive more and more customers to book promotional offers – without needing to make significant – and complicated – changes to the website itself.
Supercharging seasonal promotions through onsite messages and personalization
With Keahotels’ current website setup, it can be challenging for guests to find the many promotions and offers available for each hotel. Using onsite messages, Keahotels has been able to interact more effectively with guests, driving strong performance for relevant seasonal campaigns.
“With our website, it can be difficult to direct people to the promotions that we want them to see. [Triptease’s onsite messages tool] has really helped to just get people to those promotion pages”. -
Gabríela Rún Sigurðardóttir, Marketing Manager at Keahotels
Black Friday success
Keahotels offered an up to 30% discount for Black Friday 2024, a market-leading offer that was definitely worth shouting about. They kicked off their onsite promotion by adding a nudge message (a subtle message designed to gently nudge potential guests towards taking action on your website) across their hotels at the start of Black Friday.
As the end of the promotional period approached, they added a countdown message (a type of message designed to create urgency around deals and discounts).
The combination of the gentler nudge messages, followed up by a countdown, was highly effective. The nudge messages saw a strong average clickthrough rate(CTR) of 9%, and a conversion rate (CVR) of 11%, while the countdown messages saw an average 7% CTR and a 13% CVR. The use of these two messages drove over $123k in revenue over a 5 day period.
Spotlighting the Northern Lights
Along with optimizing the website during global sales periods like Black Friday, Keahotels also runs its own sales periods that lean into the unique benefits of visiting Iceland. In October, they ran a “northern lights” up to 15% sale encouraging visitors to book throughout the winter months – when they would be most likely to get a glimpse of this famous phenomenon.
Although this was a more limited offer than the black friday campaign, with both a lower discount percentage and a more defined time frame, Keahotels still saw very strong performance, with a 4.14% clickthrough rate and a 4.76% conversion rate. By using a countdown message to encourage urgency, and incorporating iconic Icelandic imagery, Keahotels was able to drive over 30k in revenue through this message.
Preventing cart abandonment with exit messaging
Keahotels has implemented exit messaging across 3 properties, helping to keep guests in the booking journey and driving over $38k in revenue in Q4 of 2024.
Using messages creatively to capture bookings well into the future
Ahead of the August 2026 solar eclipse, which will be a major tourism event in Iceland, Keahotels saw an opportunity to beat its competitors and OTAs to the punch. Using Triptease messages, they targeted website guests with messages encouraging them to email their sales team directly to book rooms for this period. Within a few days of putting these messages live back in July, they had nearly sold all their inventory for this period – without even making the booking dates available on their website.
Targeting guests across the whole journey
In addition to its powerful use of Triptease messages to convert guests, Keahotels uses Triptease Metasearch to attract guests in the research stage, achieving an 18.6x return on ad spend last year. The team also uses Triptease’s display retargeting and email tools to recapture guests who might have otherwise been lost, with display retargeting achieving a huge 65.2x ROAS - and email contributing 5% to Keahotels’ direct website revenue. By using this combination of tools, Keahotels is able to make sure that guests both land on the brand’s website – and choose to book direct.
Continued success with Triptease’s direct booking tools
When asked how important driving bookings direct is to Keahotels’ marketing strategy, Gabriela will tell you: “It’s everything”. And we here at Triptease couldn’t agree more. By employing effective marketing tools across the guest booking journey in a creative way, and continuing to optimize its messaging capabilities, Keahotels can continue to drive direct bookings and thrive in Iceland’s dynamic booking landscape.
