September 11th: a fateful day whose economic consequences dragged out over several months and caused a chain of disasters for many sectors. In the hotel sector, occupancy fell 10 points and, although it was a general crisis for everyone, for NH it coincided with the acquisition of two chains in Holland and Germany, and with an international expansion process that involved the entry of 17 countries and brought 96 new establishments to its normal offer.

The company needed to integrate the newly acquired hotels and launch the brand in new markets, where it was completely unknown, and it found itself with a total of 250 different ways of gathering and storing information, causing all its customers’ information to be put together without any uniformity.

The objectives were clear: on one hand, to alleviate the effects of the drop in occupancy by keeping the loyal customers of the recently acquired chains, and at the same time trying to increase the share with an appropriate strategy for each country. The NH Hotels challenge: to create different, “local” sales and marketing strategies for each of the 17 countries the chain was penetrating with a common denominator: segmentation.

The first step was to unify the customer information in order to work with one single database. From there, the company tried to appropriately segment its clientele in order to prioritize consumers and markets according to the degree of penetration and the knowledge of the brand in each country.