Inge Huijbrechts, Global SVP Sustainability, Radisson Hotels on: Radisson history and revamping the Radisson Rewards loyalty program • On “Brand architecture” - 9 brands and a single loyalty program • On Lifestyle brand, local experiences & green mobility strategy • On personalisation • On synergies between sustainability and loyalty programs • On the biggest opportunities and challenges for Radisson Rewards in 2024 • and 3 personal Questions.
GLOGLO Video Interview at ATM 2023 with Inge Huijbrechts, Global SVP Sustainability, Radisson Hotels on Radisson Rewards, Sustainability, and Green Mobility
Inge Huijbrechts, Global SVP Sustainability, Security, Communications, Radisson Hotels
0:00: On Radisson history and revamping the Radisson Rewards loyalty program
1:10: On “Brand architecture” – 9 brands and a single Radisson Loyalty program
2:25: On Lifestyle brand, local experiences & green mobility strategy
3:49: On personalization and loyalty program features
5:50: On synergies between sustainability and loyalty programs
9:00: On the biggest opportunities and challenges for Radisson Rewards in 2024
10:00: If you had a magic wand, what customer experience or loyalty feature would you invent?
11:00: If you have 1 million points, where would you spend them?
11:20: If you could advise your younger self on loyalty, what would it be?
Anastasia Levashova, GLO: It’s a pleasure to be here at ATM’s Radisson Hotels booth with Inge Huijbrechts, Global SVP Sustainability, Security, and Communications of Radisson Hotels. We would love to start this interview with Global Loyalty Organisation with questions on sustainability and your loyalty program. Can you give us an overview of the Radisson loyalty program, its status, and what you’re looking forward to in the next 12 months?
Inge Huijbrechts, Radisson: It’s my pleasure, and thank you for having us. Radisson today is 1100 hotels in 90 countries with 9 amazing brands. Everything is underpinned by our Radisson Rewards loyalty program, which has been around for a long time. We have 11 million members, and we’re currently revamping the program. The tagline is “So easy, so much more” and that’s what we are delivering so you have faster accession to VIP tiers and you start getting benefits from day one and of course sustainability options on the loyalty program.
Anastasia Levashova, GLO: Your recent efforts are very impressive with the re-launch of the program and GLO has recently published on these. I congratulate you on your ability to connect emotional loyalty to quite a diverse 9 brands. How do you balance this difficult task of nine brands and one loyalty program, what advantages it has?
Inge Huijbrechts, Radisson: One of the key things we have done was starting on this strategic journey 5 years ago. This journey had many initiatives – sustainability, loyalty, etc., but it also focused on reworking our brand architecture. Before our company name was different. We rebranded as Radisson Hotel Group, and of course, Radisson is in a lot of the brand names – by Radisson, Radisson Blu, Radisson Collection, and many more Radisson variations – each with their own unique identity. By doing so it made it much clearer to the guests. Radisson rewards were also renamed and it connects everything – connects all the brands and all essence, which travelers can find in any of our brands.
Anastasia Levashova, GLO: On customer journey – a lot of programs now starting to view the customer journey as one ‘ecosystem”, e.g. from airfare, and hotel stays to local experiences. You have a lot of global partners – airlines and retail partners. How do you approach and perceive partnerships? What do you plan in the future – increase the global reach? Or you’re very careful in selecting the right partners for your type of guest?
Inge Huijbrechts, Radisson: I think you’re right in saying that experience counts for lifestyle brands. For example, we won an award yesterday at Business Traveller Awards best lifestyle brand in the Middle East. Lifestyle is on the agenda for travelers. Local experiences are key. So for future partnerships, our team is working very hard and focusing on growing those local experience partnerships. Then, on the sustainability side, one of the things we’re focusing on is green mobility, making sure that we connect our green mobility with our loyalty program. For example, in India, where we have 150 hotels, we are making sure every four hours away you have a Radisson in this continent and we’re making sure that they’re all equipped with Evie chargers to enable green mobility and link that to our loyalty.
Anastasia Levashova, GLO: This is very impressive for such a big country like India. There is more and more talk about personalization and tailoring the customer approach. We all want adequate and targeted advertising, but at the same time, there is a question of data privacy and GDPR in a lot of markets. How do you balance this difficult question of achieving more personalization, but being not too invasive?
Inge Huijbrechts, Radisson: Of course, the first thing I have to say is that we always follow all the privacy regulations. We’re very strict with that and being headquartered in Europe, we are part of the strictest customer privacy regulation. We also do a lot of localization. For example, if you look at the www.radissonhotels.com website, it’s been awarded because it’s the website with the most localized languages, 29 languages to be precise. It means bringing localized promotions and offers to you when you are in a certain location. In terms of interacting with our members, our customers can choose what kind of benefits they want. You can say ‘I want faster earning of points’ or “I will always prefer a discount’ and there are other options like that which you can make part of your profile. In terms of interacting with the guests, we give them more choices and we try to offer the best in a particular location.
Anastasia Levashova, GLO: The theme of this year’s ATM is sustainability and the path toward Net Zero. Customers are very passionate about this, and probably everyone wants to have a more sustainable, green future. How can loyalty programs be part of this journey? At the moment, the emphasis is on the hotels to deliver but it is a two-way partnership between the customer and the operator. How can customers be part of the loyalty program to achieve sustainability?
Inge Huijbrechts, Radisson: I think it’s a very excellent point. A lot of aspects of what hotels have to do on the path towards Net Zero transformation are very technical – it’s about a building structure, about type of energy, which has to be renewable energy, it’s about how you structure your operations to make sure that the operations are also real in terms of setting the right temperature bandwidths in the rooms, etc. It’s too technical to bring to a guest. But I think it is essential to engage guests in choosing the right hotels, namely the sustainable hotels. That’s where I think, we have a lot of potential – connecting with what guests want and connecting to the loyalty program because in a loyalty program, you know your guest who is staying with you and that’s why we choose to make sustainability part of a loyalty program, in carbon neutral stays made easy for example. A guest can easily say, ‘I want to have a carbon neutral stay’, or ‘I want to offset my carbon footprint’. We make it easy. But in the future, because we make guests choose what kind of loyalty program they want, we will make sustainable choices part for that. For example, if a corporate member applies to Radisson Rewards ‘green housekeeping” to all of their employee members we will make it part of our technology for that client and everywhere. Carbon neutral stays, green mobility, or sustainable choices we want to make them part of the loyalty program choices.
Anastasia Levashova, GLO: This is one of the areas where more big data is positive and driving the whole customer proposition, offering more tailored and more adequate solutions.
Inge Huijbrechts, Radisson: I think for myself as a traveler, I would like that. And it’s already easy if I can say ‘This is my preferred partner. I always stay at Radisson hotels. I use Radisson Rewards too and I want to have green housekeeping or I want it always as part of my stay. That’s a choice which I can indicate once. For example, I always want to donate points to this or that charity – this is something that we could future do because our platforms are getting better.
Anastasia Levashova, GLO: This is a very socially positive impact feature. What do you see as the biggest opportunities and challenges for Radisson and Radisson Rewards loyalty program?
Inge Huijbrechts, Radisson: I would say there’s always opportunity because a great opportunity is what you mentioned before is that guests want sustainability, and they want to feel part of that emotional connection to a brand and loyalty program. I think the great opportunity is there to personalize the experience for the guest. The challenge is how we can accelerate those ideas and add the technology to our loyalty program. We have many ideas that we want to work on and that we have lined up, but we need to realize that in our technological environment, it takes a bit of time. The other one for me on sustainability is to accelerate net zero because that’s a big transformation we’re doing.
Anastasia Levashova, GLO: It is a tradition of GLO interviews, in the end, to ask 3 more personal questions as we would like to know more about the leaders of our industry. First, if you had a magic wand, and you could invent any customer experience feature or loyalty program feature, what would be will it be?
Inge Huijbrechts, Radisson: It’s a very practical one actually, I would love to see urban mobility integrated into our loyalty program – the Lime scooters, any green transportation that I can choose, for example, train tickets, so I can integrate all my travel, my green travel, my green mobility into loyalty programs. It’s down to Earth, it’s not magic but I would go for that.
Anastasia Levashova, GLO: If you had, and maybe you do have as a frequent traveler, 1 million points at Radisson rewards, where you will spend them?
Inge Huijbrechts, Radisson: Very easy – I will donate them. I will donate them to one of our charities: SOS Children’s Villages, or Carbon Offsetting. But I would choose the SOS Childre Villages.
Anastasia Levashova, GLO: Now, you are Global Senior Vice President for three very important pillars of Radisson – Sustainability, Security, and Communications. If you look back now with all your experience with hospitality, customer experience, and loyalty, and you could give one piece of advice to your younger self, what would it be?
Inge Huijbrechts, Radisson: Always say yes to a new challenge because see where you end up.
Anastasia Levashova, GLO: Thank you so much and it’s a real pleasure to have you. We wish all the best to Radisson and Radisson rewards and we hope to meet you here at ATM next year.
Inge Huijbrechts, Radisson: Thank you so much too.
