Hilton Hhoner Case

In today’s world, customer relationship becomes more important in service industry, especially in hotels. They offer some reward programs that provide customer retention and also customer acquisition. In order to be a good player in competition, hotels are using loyalty programs as a key component and these programs yields to make high profits by just giving customer rewards bonuses but not discounts. As we understand from the case, four large brands which are Starwood, Marriott, Hyatt and Hilton were dominated in the hotel market. These four hotels developed their own loyalty programs in order to gain competitive advantage amongst the others. They make agreements with companies from other service industries and form alliances with other hotels to be able to stay in competition. This competitive environment creates loyalty wars between these companies.

The loyalty programs push hotels to apply CRM. They collect information about customers’ past behaviors, their wants and needs and then analyze this information to present them different opportunities. After that, this information leads to make predictions about customers’ behaviors so hotels can serve more effectively according to these predictions. The CRM structure requires cross communication in every organization so every unit in the hotels should be informed from each other to create more efficient customer management. Also, the customer reactions and feedbacks should be taken into consideration in order to develop the customer loyalty programs. In Hilton case, the reunification of Hilton Hotels Corporation and Hilton International yields them to create a better customer loyalty program. This loyalty program provided Hilton to develop databases that are full with customers’ information so they improved their services and products according to these databases. Also, they gained competitive advantage by creating a closer communication with customers and by giving value to them. Therefore, Hilton was perceived as...