With more than 20 locations in the U.S., Great Wolf Lodge is a popular chain of hotels featuring water parks and attractions that engage guests with a diverse set of lodging and dining options. Daily events are designed to entice families seeking a fun getaway and water park enthusiasts alike. Great Wolf’s Voyagers Club program provides members with special deals to encourage them to book their next visit.
Dave Van Saun is the Vice President of CRM and Ancillary for Great Wolf Lodge. In his role with the brand, he spends much of his time on the ancillary side of the business—which is everything guests can do at Great Wolf outside of booking the room. Van Saun works with pricing, packaging, and promotion of all the brand’s food and beverages, retail, and attractions alongside Great Wolf’s line of business leaders.
On the CRM side, Van Saun oversees customer communications, and that is where loyalty fits into his purview. Great Wolf launched its loyalty program a couple of years ago, and Van Saun and his team have managed the day-to-day activities supporting Voyagers Club since.
Mark Johnson, CEO of Loyalty360, spoke with Van Saun about the brand’s loyalty program, forming strategic partnerships to elevate the customer experience, and measuring success.
With more than 20 locations in the U.S., Great Wolf Lodge is a popular chain of hotels featuring water parks and attractions that engage guests with a diverse set of lodging and dining options. Daily events are designed to entice families seeking a fun getaway and water park enthusiasts alike. Great Wolf’s Voyagers Club program provides members with special deals to encourage them to book their next visit.
Dave Van Saun is the Vice President of CRM and Ancillary for Great Wolf Lodge. In his role with the brand, he spends much of his time on the ancillary side of the business—which is everything guests can do at Great Wolf outside of booking the room. Van Saun works with pricing, packaging, and promotion of all the brand’s food and beverages, retail, and attractions alongside Great Wolf’s line of business leaders.
On the CRM side, Van Saun oversees customer communications, and that is where loyalty fits into his purview. Great Wolf launched its loyalty program a couple of years ago, and Van Saun and his team have managed the day-to-day activities supporting Voyagers Club since.
Mark Johnson, CEO of Loyalty360, spoke with Van Saun about the brand’s loyalty program, forming strategic partnerships to elevate the customer experience, and measuring success.
Good afternoon, good morning. This is Mark Johnson from Loyalty360. Hope everyone's happy, safe and well. I want to welcome you to another episode of our Leaders in Customer Loyalty series. In this series we speak with the leading brands about what they are seeing and hearing on the frontlines of customer channel and brand loyalty. Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Dave Ansan, the Vice President of CRM and Ancillary for Great Wolf Resorts. Thank you very much for taking the time to join us today, dave. How are you Glad to be here? First off, I would love to know a little bit more about you, so can you tell us about your current role at Great Wolf Lodge and maybe a fun fact about yourself?
Speaker 2:
Absolutely so. I am the Vice President of CRM and ancillary at Great Wolf Lodge. I've been here for about seven years. Prior to this, I was with United Airlines for about seven years doing merchandising, finance and operations strategy with them. Before that, I got my MBA from University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Speaker 2:
In my role as VP of CRM and ancillary, I spend a lot of time on the ancillary side of the business, which is everything you can do at Great Wolf besides booking the room. We are a chain of hotels with water parks and attractions, and so I work through pricing, packaging, promotion of all of our food and beverage retail and attractions with our line of business leaders enable you to pre-buy a lot of that and make sure that the customers have the best experience they can. On the CRM side of things, I deal with communicating with our customers and that's where loyalty fits in. We launched our loyalty program a couple of years ago and I've been kind of overseeing the day-to-day of it since then, with my team really trying to drive our repeat rate and make sure customers are getting everything they can out of a Great Wolf's Day.
Speaker 2:
A fun fact about me I've got two daughters getting everything they can out of a Great Wolf stay. A fun fact about me I've got two daughters, an 11-year-old and an 8-year-old. My 11-year-old considers herself to be a water park aficionado. We go around to all the Great Wolves and she tries all the slides.
Speaker 1:
It's pretty fun, it'd be great to have an overview of the Great Wolf Lodge Voyagers Club membership program how the program works, how members engage with the program and what the benefits are.
Speaker 2:
Absolutely so. The Great Wolf Lodge Voyagers program launched, um about almost two years ago now and um, it is a program that is based on rewarding customers for uh, for spending with us um, not only on their room but also while they're at the lodge, so their entire folio goes into their points calculation. Members earn 10% back on two night or more stays, for everything on their folio except for alcohol and taxes. That 10% is converted into Voyager's points, which are then automatically applied at the next booking. So when customers come back, they automatically get a discount, essentially of $1 for each point on their next stay. You can engage with it by signing up via the website, via the app or through the call center, and we have had multiple millions of users sign up and 90 millions of points earned.
Speaker 1:
Great Wolf Lodge has a partnership with Hilton Grand Vacations to create more travel choices for guests. Both organizations. How did the partnership connect to your brand's overall customer loyalty experience and customer engagement efforts?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so our mission at Great Wolf is to bring joy to families and we constantly look for different ways to do that. The partnership with Hilton Grand Vacations is a great way to expose their members to Great Wolf and enable them to use their points to come stay at Great Wolf. Great Wolf and enable them to use their points to come stay at Great Wolf, have a little bit different experience than maybe some of their other properties in HGV and really learn and experience more things at Great Wolf than maybe they otherwise would have. And so you know, we tend to think that our locations are pretty fun and that people, families with kids and especially young kids, can really gain a lot by coming in and joining with us. And then hopefully we'll come back soon. On the flip side with the partnership, there will be a presence of HGV in the Great Wolf Lodges, so our current Great Wolf guests can then experience and learn more about what HGV has to offer and potentially sign up for a package to go and experience one of their properties.
Speaker 1:
As you know, emotional loyalty is very important for brands today. It's top of mind for many brands. Travel and vacation, especially with a family component to it, can be a very emotive experience, creating happy memories for the family. You know how do you define emotional loyalty and how does Great Wolf Lodge foster emotional connections with its guests?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so we, we are very fond of the emotional loyalty. We hope to be on the positive side of the emotions. We tend to think that Great Wolf is a fun place. We like to say that you come as a family to Great Wolf Lodge and you leave as a pack, right, and so all of the fun that you have there the eating, the drinking, the water parks, the attractions, even the retail and the character experiences, hopefully those all foster core memories that then bring your pack closer together and create lifetimes of memories.
Speaker 1:
Dave. Another question we're always laser focused on is how do you measure the success of your customer loyalty and customer experience efforts? What KPIs do you use to make sure that your loyalty strategy and efforts are on track?
Speaker 2:
So our main KPI is repeat rate and we've seen very good success with that double digit repeat rate growth from Voyagers, raising our overall baseline not just Voyager members but in total. Aside from that, of course, we focus on NPS and customer experience. We've seen really good NPS feedback from our guests. We do surveys to every single guest after they leave Voyagers or not, and then beyond that we are looking at the customer engagement and the way that they interact with the Voyagers program and what we found is that people who join Voyagers not only do they stay more with us, but they tend to spend more and have more visits. So overall we feel like it's a very good program.
Speaker 1:
Loyalty360 recently released our Next Generation Customer Loyalty paper, which examined how brands think about the future of customer loyalty. What does Next Generation Customer Loyalty mean to Great Wolf Lodge, and is Next Generation Customer Loyalty something that you've defined?
Speaker 2:
You know, I think loyalty is an evolving space overall. What we're trying to do with Voyagers as we move forward is to become more than just a transactional point-based system and really be something that again impacts the overall experience. So we think our setup of having the entire folio be able to be earned upon really plays into the overall experience that we're trying to drive at Great Wolf and beyond that. As we grow, we're looking to have more and more ways for customers to interact with Voyagers and earn points, so it's not just a single transactional kind of experience for them, but it's something that they can then earn outside of the lodger by engaging with us in different ways. So I think that's very much in the spirit of the next gen loyalty.
Speaker 1:
How does Great Wolf Lodge plan to engage and appeal to the next generation of guests as well?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so we are constantly evolving. You know, our demographic is constantly changing. We go after families with young children, and so the way that parents with young children tend to engage or our customers who are coming to the lodge tend to engage constantly shifts. And so we spend a lot of time with our marketing agencies staying on top of trends, trying to go through different channels and trying to stay on top of what people are interested in engaging with and what other retailers and maybe less so the traditional hospitality are doing with loyalty, so that we can kind of emulate that and give people the instant gratification and feedback that they seem to be wanting now. So we tend to try to develop in that space.
Speaker 1:
Dave, when you find yourself out shopping at the mall or even online, are there customer loyalty programs or brands that you are drawn to, that you admire, and what do you think they do particularly well that drives loyalty to you?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I think personally, mcdonald's is a really good customer loyalty brand, not only from how you earn or what you earn on, but how they engage with the customer and utilize kind of some of the smaller snippets of abilities to engage in order to drive, repeat or drive you in. I mean, not a week goes by that you don't get a push notification or something with a great deal from McDonald's saying that you have X number of points and they can be used for this special promotion. So I really applaud that. Another one that I'm fond of is Dick's Sporting Goods. Dick's enables you to earn not only through spending with them, but also through kind of doing things that are core to their brand. So if you link your fitness activities with Dick's, you can actually earn points just by going on a walk or exercising. I also find their user interface on the app to be pretty impressive, but that's a customer experience thing, so I would definitely say those two are two that I admire.
Speaker 1:
Last question. I have a little self-serving, but what can Loyalty360 do to help you and your team with your customer loyalty efforts, and what resources are you looking for?
Speaker 2:
loyalty 360 standpoint. You know, I think the uh staying on top of the trends and um new ways that that customers are engaging with loyalty and other brands are um are innovating in this space is key Um. So you know, I think it's it's hard uh in as a as a professional nowadays to to stay on top of everything. So having Loyalty360 as a resource there makes it a lot easier in the loyalty space.
Speaker 1:
Well, Dave, thank you very much for those great insights. Looking forward to learning more and hearing more about Great Wolf Lodge throughout the upcoming year. And now we have our quickfire question section. We'd like to limit these to a one word response or short phrase. Answer the first question we have are you ready? What is your favorite word, Behavior. What is your least favorite word? Know what excites you Innovation. What do you find tiresome Bureaucracy. Is there a book that you've read that you'd like to recommend to business colleagues?
Speaker 2:
Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.
Speaker 1:
What profession other than the one that you're currently in would you maybe like to attempt?
Speaker 2:
Restaurateur.
Speaker 1:
What do you enjoy doing that you don't often get time to do? Going to the beach. Who inspired you to become the person that you are today? Richard Thaler. What do you typically think about at the end of the day? What I have to do tomorrow. And the last question is how do you want to be remembered by your friends and family?
Speaker 2:
I'd like to be remembered as kind.
Speaker 1:
Well, Dave, thank you very much again for taking the time to speak with us today. Again, looking forward to learning more about Cratewell Pods throughout the remainder of 2024. We appreciate all you do for customer loyalty and thank you again. Thank you. Thanks everyone for taking the time to join us for this edition of Leaders in Customer Loyalty. Make sure you join us back soon. Until then, have a wonderful day.
