Profiling the Resort Guest Through a Three Phase Study

Recent SLRG work for a high-end luxury resort utilized a three-phase approach to develop a holistic profile of property guests. Through this research, SLRG was able to provide our clients with the demographics, geographic origins, life traits and psychographics of high-end resort guests through both the matching of property house files against marketing databases and through customized primary research.

The first phase of this research was a database match and overlay to assign past guests to various marketing segments. Working directly with our client, SLRG performed a data overlay and segmentation of the client’s guest records. The resulting data matching and segmentation analysis yielded a customized report that included frequency distributions and assignment of each guest record to its relevant segment among 70 established lifestage clusters. The report detailed the number and percentage incidence of guests assigned to each cluster, along with detailed definitions of each cluster’s differentiating characteristics. These characteristics included: age, marital status, home ownership, incidence of children within the household, income, urbanicity, and net worth. The segmentation then allowed us to assign members of the client’s file to their respective clusters and then incorporate those variables into the 2nd phase; custom survey research.

The second phase of this research saw SLRG develop a comprehensive survey instrument that collected and analyzed demographics, behavioral and spending data, as well as a battery of attitudinal questions, aimed at enhancing the demographics collected and assigned through the segmentation (1st phase). The survey went beyond the basic demographics and lifestage data to measure our client’s visitor perceptions and satisfaction levels across a variety of competitive destinations. Each were evaluated against several key purchase drivers/performance factors, to assess the relative strength of these brands. In addition to these questions, we incorporated preferred amenities at the resort, and reactions to potential new concepts. This allowed us to identify specific actionable opportunities to enhance the property’s digital offerings, communications strategy and onsite amenities.

The 3rd and final phase supplemented the online research survey detailed above. SLRG conducted qualitative in depth interviews to add a deeper understanding and breadth to the survey findings. These qualitative sessions surfaced key issues and expository reactions of the resort’s offerings as well as those of the competitive set. Through these interviews, SLRG elicited visitors’ emotional connection or disconnection to the resort as a destination, with appropriate probing to get at motivations behind the decision and consideration process, as well as an assessment across the key areas of inquiry and product differentiation.

The results from these three phases helped SLRG determine the impact of various amenities and communications elements, as well as how best to differentiate the property against the defined competitive set. Having worked extensively with multiple leading golf destinations, resort properties and travel brands, the principals of Sports and Leisure Research Group recognize that to devise the most impactful marketing strategies, a custom consumer research program, can efficiently provide our clients with the insights needed to better understand past guests and target potential future guests that share the same traits and characteristics. Click here to learn more about how we can do this for you!