GuestConnect Hotel Promotions Platform for IHG

The impact

Pre-redesign adoption was 11%. The rebuilt 8-step wizard cut campaign launch time by 50% and spread across multiple hotel brands, putting promotions franchise managers used to wait on engineering for into their own hands in minutes.

GuestConnect gave IHG brand marketers and franchise managers a self-serve platform to create, manage, and deploy personalized promotions across properties. I led the cross-functional team through design, build, and rollout of a tool that unified email, Wi-Fi, and on-site signage campaigns behind one flexible interface.

11% adoption is a usability verdict, not a marketing problem

Before the redesign, only 11% of properties used GuestConnect. The easy read is "promote it harder." The honest read is that an 11% adoption rate is the tool telling you it is too hard to use. IHG's global properties were running promotions with inconsistent tools, fragmented workflows, and no shared way to target guests on profile data. Some had workarounds. Many simply did not run campaigns, because the process was not worth it. The teams most motivated to engage guests were stuck waiting on engineering or corporate approval.

The design problem was a real tension, not a feature gap: flexible enough for local activation, governed enough for brand consistency across hundreds of properties. Franchise owners wanted creative control, brand teams wanted consistency, engineering wanted clarity, and all three were right. Rather than pick a winner, I built the structure that satisfied all of them: an 8-step guided wizard with campaign templates for common promotion types, a drag-and-drop editor, and preview-and-approval workflows that gave brand teams confidence without becoming a bottleneck. Governance lived in the templates, so freedom and consistency stopped being a trade-off.

The platform launched with training built for rapid property-level rollout, and adoption spread across brands faster than expected. The 50% cut in time-to-launch was not just a number, it changed who could run a campaign and how often, which is the actual point of a self-serve tool.

What this built

• A self-serve marketing capability for franchise managers. For the first time, regional teams could run their own targeted promotions without routing through corporate or engineering.
• A foundation for CRM and loyalty growth. Guest profile integration and multi-channel delivery gave IHG a platform to build on, not just a campaign tool.
• Scalable brand governance. Templates and approval workflows let the system flex for local needs while keeping the brand consistent across a global footprint.