Transforming Remote Selling and Resort-Wide Reach with Visiting Media
Set on Cable Beach in Nassau, Bahamas, Grand Hyatt Baha Mar is the largest of three hotels within the Baha Mar resort complex, alongside SLS Baha Mar and Rosewood Baha Mar. The luxury resort offers 1,800 guest rooms and 82,000 square feet of indoor meeting space at the Baha Mar Convention, Arts & Entertainment Center, home to three ballrooms and more than a dozen breakout rooms.
Business at the property runs roughly 60% leisure and 40% group, a mix that shifts seasonally with school calendars and event demand. Dwynette Sawyer, Marketing Communications Manager, and Kia Guilford, Associate Marketing Director, lead a small resort marketing team that has grown the property’s use of Visiting Media since its original rollout. With more than 120,000 sq. ft. of event venues, from beachside locations to beautifully appointed lawns and terraces, two guest towers, a dozen-plus pools, and dozens of dining outlets spread across a sprawling campus, the team needed a way to make an enormous property easy for both guests and planners to navigate, and to keep its digital presence current as the resort continued to grow year after year.
Situation
Before Visiting Media, the property relied on a limited virtual tour that focused almost entirely on the convention center, paired with a short recap video of the guest rooms. Both assets were built around the time the hotel opened and hadn’t kept pace with the additions and renovations ownership continued to invest in year after year.
The sales team’s structure added another layer of challenge. With roughly 10 of its members working remotely rather than on property, selling a resort this size meant describing spaces the team itself couldn’t always walk a prospect through in person. Without a tour that reflected the full property, remote sellers had to lean on static photos and their own description of spaces they weren’t standing in.
Process
Grand Hyatt Baha Mar came to Visiting Media through a referral from a fellow property in the Hyatt Resort Alliance, a group of 25 Hyatt resorts across the US and the Caribbean, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many travelers were hesitant to book without seeing a property first. Since then, the team has brought Visiting Media’s crew back to the property four times to keep pace with a new event lawn, restaurant changes, and evolving decor, in addition to navigating a contracting process slowed by legal review and account turnover on both sides.
Resort-Wide Reach Through Email
Rather than limiting the Visiting Media link to sales and marketing, the team added it to the email signature of every employee across the resort. Kia Guilford, Associate Marketing Director, said the reach that decision created has been one of the most effective moves the team has made with the platform:
Resort-wide, we have employees, and people from all departments are sending out emails with the tour link on it. So I think that helped us.
Equipping Sales, Events, and Weddings Teams
The sales team uses the platform to point prospects to specific room types or event spaces, while the event sales team relies on it to show ballrooms and outdoor spaces in multiple configurations to planners. The weddings team uses it to walk brides through space options. Kia pointed to the platform’s CGI renderings as filling a gap the team couldn’t close with photography alone:
We don’t have a lot of pictures of our event spaces, or pictures that are set up. So the CGI is really useful because they can actually see what one of our largest ballrooms looks like in a couple different settings.
Upselling at the Front Desk
Front desk agents use an iPad loaded with the Visiting Media tours to upsell guests to better room types, particularly useful when the hotel is at full occupancy and doesn’t have a physical room available to show.
Results
Enabling a Largely Remote Sales Team
With most of the sales team members working remotely, Visiting Media has made it possible to sell space and walk prospects through virtual site visits without anyone needing to be on property. Kia described the shift in efficiency it’s brought to the team:
The team is able to sell the space without having to physically be there, with the site tours, or with site visits. On the new platform, they can send a link out very specifically calling out the room types or spaces that they’re recommending. I think it has helped the team be more efficient.
Filling a Gap in Event Space Photography
The platform’s CGI-rendered tours give planners a way to visualize ballrooms and lawns configured for their specific event, a need the team noted was previously hard to meet.
The CGI is really useful because they can actually see what one of our largest ballroom and lawns look like in a couple different settings.
Extending Reach Beyond Sales and Marketing
By embedding the Visiting Media link resort-wide in every employee’s email signature, the property extended the tool’s reach well past its original sales and marketing use case, and the team credits this decision as an effective move they’ve made with the platform.
Summary
Five years into using Visiting Media, Grand Hyatt Baha Mar has folded the platform into nearly every guest-facing and sales function on property, from front desk upselling to wedding sales to a resort-wide email signature rollout. For a resort this size, spanning three hotels, 45 restaurants, and a dozen-plus recreational amenities, that kind of navigable, always-current visual presence isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s how the team keeps the property feeling as expansive and current in a browser as it does in person.
Grand Hyatt Baha Mar Quick Overlook
- Segment: Luxury Resort
- Space: 1,800 rooms | 82,000 sq. ft. meeting space
- Facts: Visiting Media link embedded resort-wide in every employee’s email signature, extending reach well beyond sales and marketing