Tips for Resort Management from Grand Pacific Resorts
Grand Pacific Resorts has been serving over 80,000 highly engaged owner families for the past three decades. Resort Trades recently spoke with COO Nigel Lobo and General Manager Clinton Owen to discuss their owner communication and engagement strategies along with what makes them successful.
Maintaining High Owner Engagement
Resort Trades: Nigel, how do you consistently keep Grand Pacific Resorts (GPR) owners engaged with the timeshare lifestyle beyond just their once-yearly vacation?
Nigel Lobo: Here at Grand Pacific Resorts, one of our core beliefs is that Ownership is an all-encompassing lifestyle that serves to ignite a sense of adventure, bring people closer together, and help them create incredible lifelong memories. From ensuring our owners are satisfied with every aspect of their vacation experience, to keeping them highly engaged the rest of the year, they are at that center of what we do as a company, and we build our communication strategies around that guiding principle.
Resort Trades: What platforms do you use to maintain a high degree of owner engagement?
Nigel Lobo: We utilize multiple different channels of communication to remain in close contact with our owners not only during their vacations, but also throughout the year. From monthly newsletters detailing resort updates and renovation projects, to social media accounts that share beautiful photos and travel inspiration, to ensuring we keep them protected from timeshare exit scams, we strive to cultivate a consistently engaged owner base.
In terms of our newsletters, our main objective is to proactively communicate with owners by keeping them updated on any resort updates and planned projects in a detailed and informative way that encourages them to share their thoughts with us, allowing them to feel seen and heard. By inviting owners to take part in the conversation, we maintain an open line of communication that allows them to feel fully informed, involved, and at ease.
Our annual digital magazine, Time Together, shares vacation stories, new owner perks, and destination deep dives, plus plenty of travel tips for a variety of lifestyles and activity levels, ranging from young families to active retirees. The magazine is an ideal platform to communicate with our owners in an engaging format while demonstrating the value of ownership far beyond their use week at their home resort.
We also recognize and appreciate the far-reaching impact of social media to connect with owners. We created and maintain accounts for every resort that we manage, featuring property updates and vacation inspiration, giving owners even more ways to engage and share with one another. Any messages that we receive on social media are immediately routed to a vacation specialist who is available seven days a week to assist with any reservation questions, resort information, and contact information.
Together with the timeshare industry and State Attorney Generals, we’ve been working to ensure that our owners are not taken advantage of by falling victims to the increasingly sophisticated timeshare scams that have been circulating in recent years. Our “Exit Smart, Exit Safe” campaign details common timeshare scams for our Owners to be aware of and provides them with numerous internal and external resources to ensure they remain protected from fraudulent timeshare exit operations.
Providing Exceptional Customer Service
Resort Trades: How do you ensure that you provide quality customer service?
Nigel Lobo: From advanced customer relationship management software, mobile-friendly websites, and help desk articles in our online Owners Community, we offer owners a variety of tools to ensure a smooth and efficient booking process, utilizing the most advanced technologies like customer relationship management software Salesforce, mobile-friendly websites with a booking engine that maximizes merchandizing and instilling urgency, along with the property management software, SPI.
We also provide a Live Agent Chat functionality to help prioritize chats and calls while simultaneously minimizing wait times, and we have multiple instructional videos that help assist owners. We also offer support services over text, Facebook Messenger, and we ensure that any after-hours communications via voicemails, emails, and Facebook messages are not only addressed but also resolved within a 24-hour timeframe.
Resort Trades: Clinton, how do you facilitate a smooth owner experience once they are onsite?
Clinton Owen: Grand Pacific Resorts is committed to providing optimal owner experiences, beginning with the booking process, as Nigel explained, and continuing on throughout their entire stay so that our owners start and end their vacations on a positive note. We make sure that we prioritize owner communications through surveys and social media communications throughout their time onsite. Halfway through their stay, we send our owners a pulse survey that allows us to address and remedy any service issues within 12 hours, and we also send out a post-stay survey where we welcome owner feedback, whether it’s positive or helps us identify room for improvement. As a direct result of these efforts, we’ve seen a major improvement in our service scores, and more importantly, we’ve witnessed increased owner and guest satisfaction rates.
Resort Trades: Any final thoughts as we wrap up this interview?
Nigel Lobo: While the responses we have received from our owners about these initiatives to remain connected with them have been consistently positive, we will continue to seek out new ways of keeping our owners informed, engaged, and ultimately, creating experiences worth sharing.
Learn More about Grand Pacific via Resort Trades online directory.
