Way boosts The Ritz-Carlton O'ahu, Turtle Bay's bottom line with 180% more experiential transactions

Background

Since 1972, The Ritz-Carlton O'ahu, Turtle Bay has been synonymous with experiences unique to the North Shore of O'ahu, Hawaii. However, managing these experiences had become increasingly complex and time-consuming due to the use of multiple platforms and processes. The need for a more user-friendly interface for both guests and staff presented a significant challenge for the onsite team. With most guests booking activities once they arrive on the property, the management team also felt there was an untapped opportunity to increase pre-arrival spending.

"Way makes it much more appealing for guests to book our experiences. Not only have we seen a significant increase in transactions, but allowing the guest to book experiences in advance directly on our website has reduced our call volume and freed up more of our team’s time to focus on higher-value tasks.”

Customer Goals

In a nutshell, The Ritz-Carlton O'ahu, Turtle Bay needed a solution to fulfill several needs:

• An intuitive and user-friendly interface on both desktop and mobile that allowed guests to book experiences directly on their website and enabled hotel staff to launch and manage experiences efficiently
• One centralized platform that consolidated content promotion, availability management, bookings, and payments
• A two-way integration with their property management system (PMS) in order to produce a unified view of their customer
• The ability to drive pre-arrival spending and increase ancillary revenue

Results

The Ritz-Carlton O'ahu, Turtle Bay launched its partnership with Way in 2022. Way’s white-label solution integrated quickly and seamlessly into the property's existing website, creating a smooth booking experience for guests and the concierge team. The platform preserved The Ritz-Carlton O'ahu, Turtle Bay's core brand elements, ensuring a consistent brand experience across the entire customer journey, all while keeping guests on their website.

• 75%+ increase in revenue and a 180%+ increase in transaction count for experiences that were moved onto Way
• 40% of guests booked an experience during their stay with an average booking window of 15 days

With Way’s two-way PMS integration, The Ritz-Carlton O'ahu, Turtle Bay no longer had to manually match experience bookings with guest folios. Furthermore, Way offered guests flexible payment types, including the option to bill experiences directly to their rooms.

"Our other platform didn’t integrate with our PMS, so we had to physically write out vouchers for vendors leading our experiences. The vendor would then have to send us an invoice. It was a huge operational burden to have to reconcile that every day and manually post it to our PMS. With Way we can now automatically disburse payments to vendors which has streamlined our operations significantly.”

The next step for The Ritz-Carlton O'ahu, Turtle Bay is to continue adding more experiences for their guests and growing ancillary revenue.