TravTalk Middle East Online Magazine
Listening to the needs of B2B customers and travel agents, Radisson Hotel Group designed tailor made solutions. Ayse Abbas, Marketing Manager B2B and B2C, Radisson Hotel Group shares with TRAVTALK some of the initiatives taken during the pandemic and initiatives for this year to attract more small meetings in their portfolio.
Shehara Rizly
How important are the travel agents and bookers for Radisson Hotel Group?
In the Dubai office, we look after more than 100 hotels in Middle East and Africa with quite a few new openings this year. Especially during COVID and now if I can say almost post COVID, there has been some shuffles between market segments and channels but travel agents have been an important source and our clients. What we do with our travel agents and other different types of B2B customers we have different programmes and solutions under the umbrella of the ‘Radisson rewards’ programme we try to serve the needs of different types of customers. One of the most important programmes for the travel agents is we incentivise them and we tell them if you enroll for the Radisson rewards programme for travel agents you earn the possibility to earn points across approximately 550 hotels in Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific with this big portfolio so when they enroll as a travel agent to the programme they earn points for every business booking.
What are the notable changes over the past years?
Especially when we look at the B2B customers what has changed over the years now we are now almost over two years since the pandemic started, I can say one of the most important things we have done and what I am proud of as a hospitality company we took the time to listen to the market and our customers and what their needs are, the way their bookings have changed and the way they organise meetings or groups have changed so we have to listen and understand the customers understand their needs when booking an event or stay. I want to talk about B2B marketing solutions a very important focus has been around the Radisson Groups meetings concept for us and how it evolves around the feedback and the needs of our customers and especially during the covid time. As you know the digitalisation in events was a strong market trend even before covid 19. Even during the pandemic and post pandemic we were featuring hybrid events, it was seen in great demand than ever before because it pushed our planners and customers to be allowed to continue to have their meetings even if the attendance had to increase despite all the regulatory restrictions on gatherings they still wanted to have the ambience and the possibility to organise their events as easy as possible.
What prompted the concept of hybrid rooms?
We make sure that our programmes are evolving and fitting the needs of the customers. So you know the markets have shifted the regulations have shifted at Radisson we design and evolve around the needs of the customers making it more flexible for our customers. Ease of regulations makes it easier.
