Blog2021 Year In Review Transformations In Hospitality
Blog
2021 Year in Review: Transformations in Hospitality
5 min read
Jan 24, 2022
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Dear hospitality operators, partners and friends,
Your resilience continues to amaze us. We entered 2021 with excitement and trepidation. With hope that the world would go back to normal. While 2021 brought some good news, more demand and some hope for the industry, we also saw one challenge after another, from lockdowns to labor and everything in between. Looking back at 2021, two things are clear — the industry is incredibly resilient and consumers love restaurants and hospitality deeply. Through the ups and downs of the year, we grew together, evolving the industry and building back better.
In many ways, it was a transformative year for our industry. Just like we did in 2020, we continued investing in you, staying true to our philosophy to be a partner to you and the industry. In 2021, we’re proud to have supported you around the clock and around the world, generated incremental dollars that went directly back to you, and helped you connect with your guests and safeguard your teams. This included:
Launching a new category for our industry to help you do more with less, redefining SevenRooms as a Guest Experience and Retention platform as we continue helping hospitality operators acquire, engage and retain more customers — both on- and off-premise.
Generating over $235M in incremental revenue directly for our clients through the SevenRooms platform, showcasing meaningful ROI to hospitality operators using our products.
Continuing to facilitate conversations and content with global operators as they navigated a year full of uncertainty and fresh challenges one year on from the start of the pandemic.
Helping you build more than 170M guest relationships in 2021, resulting in more covers for your businesses, more often.
Providing outstanding global support — 24/7, 365 days a year — supporting you in your times of need while maintaining an NPS score of 65% (2x the industry average).
In 2021, we more than doubled the number of locations using SevenRooms, including further expansion in Australia and across Europe, bringing our platform to even more hospitality operators across the globe.
These clients included:
Here’s a snapshot of some success stories from our partners around the world.
Brodeur’s Bistro, a neighborhood favorite in Vancouver, BC moved their waitlist online, helping them collect more than 9,000 new guest profiles in six months; data that could then be used to market to guests to get them to return to the restaurant more often.
Long Meadow Ranch, St. Helena’s famed winery, was able to achieve 2x higher guest spend by cross-selling using the SevenRooms reservation widget to market restaurant reservations alongside wine tastings and unique experiences.
Renowned UK- and Hong Kong-based restaurant groups Zuma Restaurants and Aqua Restaurant Group, respectively, were able to reduce no-show rates by more than half in 2021, helping them boost profitability with more guests in seats.
Matteo, a restaurant group based out of Sydney, turned on automated marketing campaigns, sending personalized emails that resulted in a 60% open rate, and 19% click to open rate, helping them strengthen guest relationships while boosting covers.
These global success stories demonstrate just how far the industry has come from the start of the pandemic in utilizing technology from partners that can help them create a more profitable model for building deeper, direct relationships with their guests. During this time, SevenRooms’ Guest Experience & Retention platform has helped them navigate this new way of doing business while keeping hospitality front and center. Throughout the year, we continued on our journey to help operators build more profitable, sustainable businesses through access to and ownership over their guest data and experiences.
All of this would not have been possible without the hard work from our stellar team at SevenRooms.
We grew our workforce to nearly 200 employees, continuing to build and invest significantly across the EMEA and APAC regions.
We hired our first Chief Financial Officer, Pam Martinez, who brought her deep knowledge of scaling SaaS companies like HubSpot into category leaders. Under her leadership, we’ve been able to direct our resources effectively to further invest in our clients.
For the third year in a row, SevenRooms made Built In’s lists for ‘100 Best Places to Work’ and ‘100 Best Midsize Places to Work’ in NYC, a testament to the incredible team and culture we are building here.
Rolling out new employee benefits, including being the first company in the world to offer all new hires the first two weeks of employment as paid time off (Fresh Start™), as well as introducing a December holiday break. To build the best products in the world, we need to attract the best talent, and we continue to iterate as we create the best place to work.
30,528Zoom meetings held by SevenRooms employees, accounting for 3,453,898minutes spent talking with clients, prospects and partners across the globe.
2,180,889 Slack messages sent by our team members over the course of 2021, continuing to improve our company-wide communication as a fully-remote workforce.
65+ cities our team calls home throughout the world, a testament to our commitment to hiring the best people for our open roles, regardless of where they live.
As a product-led company that has been building for over ten years, we continued to innovate our platform in 2021.
Created a deeper integration between our native online ordering product and CRM, giving our customers a 360-degree view of their guests and making it easier for them to execute on these insights in real-time.
Built out further guest-facing languages as we continued our global expansion, now offering 12 languages including French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Italian, Hungarian, Mandarin, and more.
Launched a proven library of automated marketing campaigns for both our online ordering and venue management systems, giving operators the ability to send campaigns proven to convert at the touch of a button, gaining them an average of $4,500 in additional revenue per month.
Rolled out a number of vaccine-related product features aimed at easing the operational burden for front-of-house staff in managing a seamless check-in process for diners.
Expanded custom auto-tag functionality to help operators intelligently capture, access and centralize information on their guests.
Throughout 2021, we also continued to redefine what it means to be an open and connected platform for hospitality operators. We pioneered this approach and have continued in our efforts to create a seamless tech stack for our clients through deep integrations with industry partners.
We launched our global partnership with TheFork, setting a new standard for collaboration between best-in-breed restaurant technology and online reservation platforms while helping operators build stronger customer relationships and more profitable businesses.
An integration with Olo offered more streamlined data capture and full data ownership for SevenRooms customers leveraging Olo’s online ordering products.
In 2021 we celebrated our 10 year anniversary and while we are proud of how far we’ve come, we’re excited about the road ahead creating a better, more sustainable future together with you. As we enter 2022, I am excited for everything to come in the year ahead. This year, I look forward to speaking with more clients, getting back on the road to more destinations to learn from those markets, eating great food, and learning how we can continue to better serve you.
