RateGain acquires BCV to help hotel chains maximize Guest Lifetime Value

RateGain today announced the acquisition of BCV, the hospitality focused social media provider with the capacity to monitor and engage the social universe.

BCV, a RateGain company will now offer a comprehensive Guest Experience Cloud platform with digital products designed to increase direct sales, provide guest interactions, and mitigate negative experiences helping hotel chains maximize the guest lifetime value.

This acquisition will further help RateGain unlock revenue across hospitality chains, cruise lines, restaurants, spas and fitness centers.

This comprehensive Guest Experience Cloud platform combines the power of BCV’s social media listening, analytics, creative and engagement capabilities with RateGain’s AI-driven cognitive revenue management and smart distribution solutions.

Commenting on the acquisition Bhanu Chopra, Founder & CEO, RateGain said, “We are delighted to welcome Benji, Ari, Cece and the BCV team to the RateGain family. RateGain and BCV will replace the traditional waterfall methodology of data collection, analysis and action with a more agile model that would bring revenue management, sales and marketing together, breaking down the traditional silos to generate unprecedented visibility and control to influence & impact the guest journey and directly measure impact on booking and Net RevPAR to maximize guest lifetime value.”

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Commenting on the acquisition Benji Greenberg, Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer, BCV said, “We couldn’t be more excited to be a part of the global RateGain family. This deal will also increase our ability to bring ‘deep learning’ powered applications for the travel and hospitality industry in the near future. The new integrated platform will give 125,000+ hotel properties, access to millions of proprietary social profiles to serve the right message, to the right guest, for the right hotel, on the right channel, every day elevating the brand experience for guests across the research, plan, book and experience journey”. We will now have access to far more rate intelligence to ensure we’re hitting the right person across the right platform while increasing guest lifetime value for hotels.”

The industry has been waiting for such a platform:

• With the rise of new information sources and internet companies like Google and Amazon pivoting to become travel companies, acquiring guests by traditional push strategies cannot suffice for hotel chains any longer, as the travelers increasingly shift to social media for inspiration, research, booking and engagement.

• Today, social media is core to the guest booking and stay experience.  80% of the guests use social media before booking a stay at a hotel and 84% of people expect a brand to respond within one hour. Research also suggests that positive interactions across social media can lead to an improvement in both number of bookings and an increase in ADR.  BCV’s own research suggests its customers have seen an average annual increase of 4% in RevPar for the first year partnering with BCV.  

• This shift in the traveler’s mind-set is creating a new dimension in hospitality where revenue, distribution and marketing functions are converging to create desire by directly engaging with the travelers and converting their intent into a favorable decision.

We are now a global award-winning team with the end to end solution capability of maximizing revenue every day, including guest experience cloud, cognitive revenue management and smart distribution solutions that process over 240 billion data points, tracks online conversations across 3,95,000 hotels globally and connects to 1,500+ demand partners impacting over $10 billion in revenue annually.