Insight & strategy A warm welcome With the global pandemic having wreaked havoc on the hospitality industry over the past two years, hotel operators need to understand more than ever exactly what it is their guests want. Editor Colette Doyle talks to Warner Leisure Hotels Jennifer McCormick to find out why its insight function is so vital to the companys future success S hort-break specialist Warner Leisure Hotels is part of the Bourne Leisure group, which also operates Haven Hotels and Butlins. The company currently has 14 hotels and coastal villas across the UK and is expected to open its 15th property, Heythrop Park in the Cotswolds, later this year. Situated on 440 acres of land next to Soho Farmhouse, the 300-room hotel will be Warners largest. This is bound to accentuate the importance of the insight team, given that the hotelier needs to ensure a steady flow of satisfied guests to keep occupancy rates high and a large part of that will be down to tapping into how existing and potential customers think. Jennifer McCormick is head of analytics and insight at Warner Leisure, and her background means she is well equipped to deal with the challenges of her current role. For seven years she worked at Whitbread, the owner of budget hotel chain Premier Inn, as well as restaurant brands such as Beefeater, Brewers Fayre and Bar + Block. She describes her time there as a fantastic experience. When she joined the company, it had 500 hotels; when she left, there were more than 900, it had expanded into Germany, and had launched a new brand called Hub by Premier Inn. Prior to that, McCormick was at Tesco for a couple of years as Clubcard marketing manager, having started her career as customer insight manager at Haven Hotels so she has, in effect, come full circle. Guest behaviour McCormicks responsibilities sit within the companys marketing function, but she says its important to flag up that it operates as a cross-functional team, providing analytics to a wide range of departments, including operations, proposition development, finance and sales. There are three individual strands to her role, she explains, the first of which is customer insight, where the team looks at market trends and competitor analysis. As well as measuring the guest experience using feedback from the whole end-to-end journey, we help support projects with quantitative and qualitative research studies, McCormick notes. The second strand is customer analytics; this is where McCormicks team will run data analysis, such as segmentations, to better understand the different kinds of guests who come to Warner. She elaborates: We will endeavour to figure out their buying behaviour and the guest journey theyre going on, and how they are using our product. We will also try to predict and model behaviour. We will spend quite a lot of time typically looking at what our guests have done previously their past Studley Castle Hotel in Warwickshire behaviour and we will then use that to predict their future behaviour; thats always really interesting. McCormicks team scrutinises, in some detail, the reasons that guests have for taking a short break or holiday. As an example, she alludes to how one guest might be feeling burnout at work: In that case, they probably just want to go away for the weekend to relax and use the spa, and enjoy some quiet time. Whereas another type of guest might want to explore by visiting a different part of the country. What we do within our team is try to appreciate all the different reasons that a guest might have for staying with us, then that is used within our marketing strategy 34 Impact ISSUE 37 2022_pp34-37 I&S Warner.indd 34 28/03/2022 15:08