How a global timeshare company accelerated its digital marketing and e-commerce engine to acquire new owners and boost the topline

The client partnered with LTM for an extensive digitization and overhaul of timeshare core systems. Together, we re-imagined the legacy platform into a modern, highly-agile, business-responsive e-commerce enterprise, supported by a robust predictive analytics discipline. This transformation now offers timeshare buyers and owners powerful online self-service search and reserve capabilities to make highly-informed buying choices using contextualized and intelligent content.

Client Overview:

The client is a leading global timeshare company that offers high-quality vacation ownership options in destination resorts worldwide as well as coveted brand-name luxury club memberships. This timeshare company used to be part of an American multinational hospitality conglomerate that offers a broad portfolio of hotels and resorts, until it was spun off into a publicly traded company

What drove the urgency behind digital transformation

After the split from its parent company, the client needed to start generating its own demand pipeline to acquire new owners. This was an important growth metric for the newly public-listed organization. To accomplish this business goal, it had to expand the world-class resort vacation experience it was known for, to its digital and web presence globally. Essentially creating its digital twin on web and mobile. Client’s go-to-market teams weren’t accustomed with attracting the new buyers in the digitally networked world. These prospects come from an evolving demographic—millennials and Gen Z who were increasingly adopting the new ways of evaluating options online and making reservations.

There were three key challenges that the client was facing:

• Low traction with millennial and Gen Z buyers.
• Disgruntled call center employees.
• Under-utilized digital-web assets.

Challenge 1: Outdated and aging systems (legacy core)

Challenge 2: Inadequate web presence and e-commerce

Challenge 3: Lack of predictive customer understanding and analytics

The client chose LTM to be the strategic partner in its digital transformation journey. LTM consulted to embark on a multi-phase roadmap to modernize its legacy tech and build new tech capabilities.

Here is a more in-depth view into this journey.

1. Digital marketing platform for a superior and personalized customer acquisition engine

Challenges:

Timeshare digital marketing teams were not able to go to the market effectively and effciently, to launch and run successful targeted campaigns.

• They had a minimal web presence in focused geographies including the US, Europe, and Asia, as well as fragmented digital marketing and e-commerce engines—and none of it was optimized.
• They also lacked a centralized platform for content and digital asset management not allowing them to leverage cutting-edge SoCoMo tech to create personalized content and impactful buying experiences.

Solution and impact:

• LTM built a robust digital platform for a stronger online presence and a content management system for client’s marketing teams.
• The new platform has transformed their outdated and digitally disconnected content approach into a cohesive, omnichannel presence across geographies and languages.
• It also enables geo-based content personalization, catering to various media and devices simultaneously.
• This has a huge impact on the client’s ability to attract new prospects to its geo-specific websites, thus positively influencing their key business performance metric of tours flow

2. System integration and process re-engineering for frictionless e-commerce

Challenges:

•  The client’s multiple antiquated legacy systems were impacting the quality, speed, and efficiency of its middlelayer e-commerce operations. 
• This would often result in hundreds of repeated re-routes to their sales and marketing call centers, frustrating everyone—buyers, owners, and employees. 
• An immediate need for legacy modernization was recognized to enable a superior user experience across the board and greater flexibility, interoperability, scalability of the underlying architecture and infrastructure. 

Solution and impact:

LTM recommended a multi-year solution roadmap to gradually sunset the client’s legacy systems with modernized microservices-based cloud-first architecture.

• The upgraded platform with better-integrated systems started supporting web and mobile omnichannel e-commerce transactions, at a much larger scale in the newly commissioned Azure cloud.

This enabled:

1. A modernized, scalable, and simplified system with a new baseline architecture that allows it to evolve as business so they can keep adding new features.
2. A layered architecture with microservices that makes it easier to manage and cost-effective.
3. Self-service web and mobile front-ends to browse available packages, buy and activate after reviewing the inventory and price, and reserve them.
4. Real-time reporting and analytics.

• The platform now offers a connected feel to current and prospective owners and members, providing seamless, frictionless, and enjoyable user experiences.
• With the leisure business going through pandemic cycles in 2020-21, the scalable and flexible architecture allows the client to quickly scale its business back and forth and optimizes the total cost of ownership.
• Considering the huge demand for online-only transactions during the pandemic, the client has increasingly leveraged e-commerce for buyer self-service. This reduces dependence on reservation call centers, and as a result improves the key business metric.

3. Harnessing data for unified, powerful insights through  the customer lifecycle

Challenges:

• The client lacked a centralized hub for predictive analytics to recommend actionable insights for optimizing marketing effort and business outcomes.
• The inefficient, legacy platform was laden with data and system silos and overlapping functionalities.
• Because of the high-value of B2C transactions in a typical timeshare business, an in-depth knowledge of customers’ financial viability was necessary for Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance, in addition to an enterprise view of a customer’s lifecycle from lead-to-cash. 

Solution and impact: 

Timeshares thrive on upselling while looking for new buyers.

• The new predictive analytics and continuous learning algorithms enriches client’s data pool, unearthing compelling real-time insights, particularly into high-value or interested buyers.
• This sense-and-respond system generates comprehensive customer 360° insights, that allowed marketing and operations teams to take quick operational and strategic actions for customer delight.

Summary

The timeshare industry has emerged as hospitality sector’s earliest comeback story of pandemic recovery. It is also one of the most active for M&A activity to gain market share. Well-planned tech-driven initiatives are allowing the industry to quickly evolve and constantly innovate, responding successfully to everchanging trends, especially as the new lifestyles of business-leisure aka bleisure and digital nomads are emerging post-pandemic.

For the timeshare industry, every single experience-transaction shall create memory- recall and loyalty. The strong and flexible digital-tech backbone that Mindtree has built for the timeshare enables its sales and marketing teams to influence buyer’s decision making and grow the demand pipeline. New modernized marketing and e-commerce engines now curate powerful visions of vacation experiences encouraging potential buyers to become the owners. It is also helpful for the organization’s bottom line that the new platform can scale in alignment with business demand.