It’s a family owned, independent luxury hotel, now run by brothers Brian and Ronan Hughes.
Pre Covid, they filled their 52 rooms for 7 months of the year with overseas tour parties.
During the winter months they relied on a loyal clientele who generally phoned the hotel to book.
When the pandemic struck the overseas tour market disappeared overnight and they were staring into a bookings black hole.
What happened?
Rather than us telling you, we recorded a podcast with Ronan.
He relates a great story of their journey from meltdown to driving over 50% of their room revenue through the
Aró booking engine.
As he says “we researched the market and Aró had the best hotel booking engine.”
In the first full month of working with the Aró Digital online booking engine, they took as much in direct revenue as they had in the whole of 2019.
I would urge any hotelier to take a listen to Ronan relate what it takes to pivot your business to a strategy which:
- Has the lowest cost of acquisition
- Encourages loyalty
- Takes business from the OTAs
- Allow you to retain control of your guests
- Increases revenue and profit
He has great insights – our favourite takeaway is “If it wasn’t for Aró and the Irish market we wouldn’t have got through the last 12 months”.
At Aró, what we do is implement strategies which increase direct bookings for luxury, independent hotels.
Our aim is to drive over 50% of your room revenue via your website booking engine, within three years of signing up.
Abbeyglen did it in less than one year.
There you will also find links to listen on Spotify and Apple where you can follow or subscribe respectively and be notified when new episodes go live.