Smart Wi-Fi brings Virgin Hotels’ guests out of the shadows

Virgin Hotels Chicago knew they were a destination for a hip, tech-savvy crowd. With all the right food, drinks, and entertainment, their hotel—the first for the Virgin brand—had no trouble attracting visitors to their bar, restaurants, speakeasy, and rooftop lounge.

But once people had dined and drank—they left. And management had no idea who they were. Because most of these patrons weren’t actually staying at the hotel. And if they were, they were often booking through a third party.

Furthermore, the hotel had no clear way to capture data about them. Which meant they lost the chance to invite them back for events, promotions, and loyalty programs.

Local Measure says…

We’re not only the hotel’s provider of guest intelligence, but also a Cisco Preferred Solution Partner, Integrator Partner and a 2018 Cisco Ecosystem Partner of the Year. And we knew just the thing to give the hotel more staying power: Wi-Fi combined with guest insights. We brought in a Cisco Meraki Wi-Fi solution that would help gather information about their patrons, while giving those patrons a perk they loved, too.

By adding a branded Wi-Fi portal and software interface to the Meraki hardware infrastructure, Local Measure and Cisco helped the hotel continue to offer fast guest Wi-Fi with top-notch bandwidth. The game-changer? The platform now included a frictionless sign-on page that gave guests a number of one-click ways to connect. And it gave the hotel a trove of customer data. Within six months, Virgin Hotels collected 40,000 emails through customer Wi-Fi, 29,000 of which were unique visitors.

Now, the hotel has the data it needs to know their guests. The marketing has the information to reach out to right people for the right events and promotions. And the guests have more reasons to keep coming back.

But the story doesn’t stop there…