HOTELIERS' VOICE S1E2
Robert Marusi, Turtle Bay Resort and improving fortunes with business intelligence
Son of a hotel inspector, our next Memory Maker was dragged around presidential suites, chauffeured by limousine as a child before joining Cape Town Hotel School founded by his father. Born in Zambia, raised in South Africa and now living in the UK, Duncan Bramwell, had embarked on a travel adventure on graduation when he decided he would return for six months. After experiencing the delights of continental Europe, he soon found a job as a Night Manager in a Central London 5* hotel. Duncan married, had children, and became an independent consultant in 2004.
In this episode we speak to the chief commercial officer for Turtle Bay Resort, Robert Marusi, previously of Hamilton Beach Resort a Fairmount Hotel Bermuda, 5star Pelican Hill Resort – he now looks after the 400 room Turtle Bay Resort on 1300 acres of land with a organic sustainable farm, spa, golf courses, and beaches.
Robert has taken Turtle Bay Report and like the previous resorts taking it on a fast-paced journey to digitalisation moving its PMS to Opera Cloud, replacing the sales and catering platform, while implementing Amadeus Advanced, Salesforce Cloud. For Robert it’s all about customer acquisition and the need to look at metric differently.
Data is a big thing for Robert – “Rather than throw marketing out there and hoping for the best. How do I get that info to hand and market the right segment to drive the revenue and capture the customer asset.” He goes on to explain how he segregates his data to deliver the right client.
As for his tech stack, he starts “I’ve had great results with Amadeus Advanced, in the cloud, placing all sales and catering info in the cloud to have better reporting opportunities, Opera cloud and Salesforce cloud – both are powerful tools. HotelIQ helps me make data driven decisions.”
Robert and Turtle Bay Resort are now able to drill deeper into its customers, sourcing the demographic info to go after the right customer, by income, zip code, slicing and dicing the data to find the best acquisition. “Drilling down into the finite results is faster when using a consolidated data system. As an entrepreneur look at the future rather than dwell in the historical trends and activities, which doesn’t help to making decisions quickly.”
Implementation success
Robert recognises that there are a lot of products out there, he tells us how he approaches procurement by first understanding what is needed and what is the team trying to accomplish. “I like to crowdsource with my team, get buy in as part of culture, decide together, and they then all feel part of this.”
Listen or watch the episode now to find out what tech he is looking at next.