Like many private companies, Hotel Tonight, a pioneer of last-minute booking apps, is coy about the effectiveness of its e-marketing effort.
But clues to its performance can be found in a sample of travelers who use it and who also happen to have signed up for Superfly, a loyalty program tracker.
Case in point: Between January 2012 and January 2014, Hotel Tonight had a higher "open rate" for its promotional e-mails than did 19 other mainstream travel brands.
Its messages were opened 33% of the time. It achieved this while sending fewer messages than its rivals.
Priceline, the giant online travel agency brand, has a lower open rate of 23% for those of its e-mails that are specifically offers for hotels. A caveat: Some other Priceline alerts, such as ones about a user's upcoming trip, have higher open rates. (See chart.)
Trawling for third-party data
How did Superfly reach these conclusions?
Many of Superfly's 200,000 users have granted it permission to scan their e-mails as a seamless way to extract miles and points balances.
While scanning the database of 100 million e-mails, the startup also gathers statistics on user behavior beyond loyalty. The company says it does this only in "an anonymized, aggregated way" and that it doesn't share any individual user's behavior with anyone.
The users in question are wealthier and younger than the US population, on average. Roughly a third of the sample earned a household income of more than $150,000, while another third had an income between $75,000 and $150,000.
The population skews young, too. About 45% of the studied group were ages 25-34, and about 30% were 35-44.
Good user retention
Have we mentioned what happens after users first try the Hotel Tonight app to book US hotels for one night?
After using the app once, the average person books 63% of their subsequent one-night stays through the app as well. Superfly knows this because Hotel Tonight users need to sign up to book through the app, after which they receive e-mails. Says Jonathan Meiri, CEO of Superfly:
"The engagement numbers are telling. Downloading a Hotel Tonight app changes the consumption habits for a material share of the users."
Positive headline numbers
We asked Hotel Tonight's CEO Sam Shank about the above statistics.
It's very validating to see the results of our intense focus on the mobile last-minute channel to deliver value to our customers.
The retention data is consistent with what we're seeing. Once someone books on HT, they come back over and over for the value of our hotel offers, quality of our app, and peace of mind that HT is on their side. The team does a great job making our emails entertaining and informative.
The same-day booking startup, which launched in January 2011, recently touted a 300% year-on-year rise in revenue.
Today it covers 23 countries with 10,000 hotel partners and says that its apps having been downloaded more than 9 million times. It has received more than $80 million in funding, and has 110-plus employees.
None of its rivals, such as Hong Kong's HotelQuickly, Paris's VeryLastRoom, the UK's Hot Hotels, or US-based Priceline's Tonight-Only Deals app have claimed as strong growth figures as those.
Still, Hotel Tonight has plenty more work to do. Take the tech-savvy users of San Francisco, for instance. Only 19% of residents who were also Superfly users had downloaded Hotel Tonight in the past two years. In comparison, 76% had interacted with Priceline.
Another telling statistic: About 12% of Hotel Tonight users overlap as Hotels.com users in the Superfly sample. If the mobile-first company broadened its penetration of travel shoppers, that overlap would presumably grow.
Adds Shank:
We have very ambitious plans for HT, and we're just in the early stages of our growth.
Business intelligence
Meanwhile, Superfly has been marketing its B2B data services to third-parties in travel, finance, and other verticals. Its service is similar to the data about mobile behavior by travelers that used to be publicized by Onavo, a mobile data compression service, before Facebook acquired it.
Dave Baggett, founder of ITA Software and now founder of e-mail software Inky, has joined as an angel investor.