Testimonial Amazing Evolution
Amazing Evolution is an independent hotel management company in Portugal, whose portfolio comprises more than 20 hotels and projects. The company boasts a strong focus on reinforcing the more positive aspects of each project, while anticipating challenges and making decisions. Their level of commitment and passion to deliver guests a unique experience and an impeccable service is what has enabled them to achieve powerful results for hotel owners and investors. The best way to define Amazing Evolution is as a hospitality dedicated company that, by working independently with its views and ideals, is creating a paradigm shift in the industry.
Sofia is the Head of Digital Marketing at Amazing Evolution, where she has been employed since 2020. She is currently responsible for leading the team in overseeing and managing the online presence of all hotels within the portfolio, offering bespoke services to drive website optimization, organic search visibility, Google hotel ads, and social media management for a diverse range of properties and business needs.
What influenced Amazing Evolution’s decision to partner with Guestcentric?
Guestcentric offers a fully integrated hotel website and booking solution, and this is what influenced our commercial department’s decision. As our Marketing Department grew, we started working more closely with Guestcentric on website design and user experience. Collaboratively with Guestcentric, our goal is to always go one step further with each website. I believe this approach is what as continued to reinforce our partnership with them over the many years of working together.
What have been some of the highlights of your partnership with Guestcentric thus far?
The biggest highlight for me would have to be the improvement of our clients’ experience. We had some websites in our portfolio that we inherited from other suppliers, and since migrating these to Guestcentric, we’ve seen a significant difference in the guest experience.
If any issues arise, we can easily talk to our Account Manager or just use Guestcentric’s support chat. Everything works fast, and the Guestcentric team really does their best to help us when we need it. I would say that the help from the Support Team has been one of the biggest highlights of our partnership with Guestcentric.
Having a fully integrated and synchronized hotel website and booking solution has been the biggest highlight for our commercial team. Particularly the ability to quickly publish special offers across many places in one go. It saves our team a lot of time, and eliminates the extra work it would otherwise take to publish everything manually.
Another highlight I have to mention would be the projects we collaboratively launched in 2022. We really saw a major evolution in terms of both web design and the web design team creating the websites for our hotels. The lead designers in these projects have been really open-minded to new ideas and to try new things in order to execute the vision of the hotels we work with.
Sleep and Nature, in particular, is one of Amazing Evolution’s most special projects to date. Francisco, Guestcentric’s website designer in charge of its creative process, fully understood our vision, the hotel’s essence and the brand look and feel. The goal was to achieve a serene website that transported visitors to a restful destination in Portugal’s countryside. In our perspective, this was executed very well.
What have been some of the business gains you have received from partnering with Guestcentric?
As a hotel management company, our goal is to always help our clients improve direct bookings and lessen dependence on OTAs and traditional travel agencies. This is where Guestcentric helps us the most. One way they do this is by providing detailed business reports at the end of each year, where our Account Manager gives us practical tips we can implement on our websites to drive more direct bookings.
The Guestcentric backoffice also has built-in business intelligence dashboards that measure both revenue performance and online traffic. This too really helps us analyze direct channel performance for the different hotels across our portfolio. It’s much easier for us to analyze all this data in one platform, rather than having to manually check each hotel’s Google Analytics.
The benefit is two-folded. Our commercial team offers monthly reports to each hotel, and business owners mostly want to know how their business is performing in terms of revenue. Guestcentric’s business intelligence dashboards show exactly what most business owners want to see. From a marketing perspective, the platform’s seamless connection with Google analytics is also helpful for us to identify trends and areas for website optimization.
