RIU Hotels & Resorts and Making Science won Gold Google Marketing Partners Award

Thursday, July 27, 2023

RIU Hotels & Resorts, along with its partner Making Science, won a Gold Google Marketing Partners Award (GMPA) in ‘Digital Transformation’.

Technological advancements and artificial intelligence (AI) have formed part of companies’ day to day for years, providing them with increasingly effective marketing tools to get the right message to the right user at the right time.

The GMPAs recognise the industry’s most innovative and high-tech projects developed using Google tools. This year, Boston Consulting Group worked on the GMPAs.

RIU and Making Science received a Gold award with a project in the Digital Transformation category called ‘Reaching the right user; RIU’s strategy to attract high-value customers by harnessing first-party data with AI’.

The RIU hotel chain was looking to enhance its campaigns to capture customers by aiming them at higher-value and profitability customers, improving user experience without lowering the number of conversions into bookings. In partnership with Making Science, the two companies transformed the digital strategy to optimise their first-party data into business data. RIU transformed its digital strategy in three fundamental steps.

Structure first-party data: The first step was to structure first-party data on Google Cloud to create a customer data platform (CDP) architecture adapted to its needs and structure.

As Juan Campins, VP of Digital Channels at Riu Hotels & Resorts explained, ‘What we were looking to do was gather all customer experience data into a single environment: one that was secure, scalable and connected that would allow us to orchestrate our audiences in real time on first-party channels like the payment channel.’

Coordinate teams: Define the joint goals between the IT and Digital Channels teams using first-party data as the basis for strategy transformation.

In the words of Álvaro Verdeja, global director of data and the cloud at Making Science, ‘each team working with first-party data provided their data sources: digital marketing platforms, contact centre platforms, the booking engine, etc.’ That established the way everyone would work together to achieve the business objectives. ‘After that, we were able to analyse user profiles to offer them a unique experience prior to reaching the website, while using it and after’, Verdeja explained.

Activate first-party data thanks to AI: With Making Science, the Direct Sales and Digital Channels teams launched a variety of proprietary technological solutions based on AI models, which our partner grouped under the name Gauss.

Working with Gauss AI solutions leveraging their first-party data allowed RIU to increase bookings by 99% and double its ROAS (return on ad spend).

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