In this webinar episode of Hotel Moment, Bailey Yeats, Marketing Manager at Revinate, sits down with Gitti Hernández, Digital Marketing Manager at Casa de Campo in the Dominican Republic, for the second session of the 2026 Benchmark Report Leadership Series — this time focused entirely on database health. Casa de Campo is one of the Caribbean's most complex hospitality operations: 315 rooms across 7,000 acres, three golf courses, a private beach, an equestrian centre, a marina, a racket centre, and a 6,000-seat amphitheater that has hosted Frank Sinatra, Andrea Bocelli, and Jennifer Lopez. Managing the guest data that flows through a property like that and using it to create genuinely personalized experiences is not a theoretical exercise. It is ten years of daily work that Gitti has led from the inside.

●Database growth is the foundation of marketing growth: North American hotels are seeing 21% to 26% database growth year over year across all property sizes. That compounding growth creates the audience that makes segmentation, personalization, and direct revenue campaigns possible, but only if the data collected is clean, complete, and structured correctly.

● Segmentation starts with knowing who your guests actually are: Casa de Campo does not have one type of guest — it has golfers, polo spectators, beach guests, equestrian visitors, marina users, concert-goers, and wedding parties, among others. Gitti describes the multi-year effort to bring disparate systems together and create distinct, actionable segments for each. "That has been our biggest challenge and our biggest task."

● A pre-arrival itinerary program raised guest satisfaction by 40%: Before Casa de Campo invested in email capture, guests would arrive with no dining reservations, no activity bookings, and sometimes discover a shooting centre on day four of a five-day stay — with no time left to use it. Now, 90% of guests arrive with a pre-built itinerary created in collaboration with a dedicated vacation planner. The catalyst was simple: having an email address to send that first outreach.

● Phone capture is the biggest global gap — and Ivy made it urgent: When Casa de Campo launched Ivy for automated on-property messaging, they discovered they had almost no mobile numbers in their database, only landlines. Building mobile phone capture into every guest touchpoint became an immediate operational priority, and the results now show up in everything from lost towel requests to real-time navigation help on a property so large that guests regularly get lost.

● 12% of North American email records are OTA-masked — and the window is closing: For every 100 guests in a hotel's database with an email address, 12 are reachable only through a temporary OTA-masked address that expires within 20 to 30 days. In EMEA, the figure reaches 34%. Gitti's team launched an OTA win-back campaign after NAVIGATE, and it outperformed expectations. The mission is to find out what makes those guests book through the OTA, and remove that reason.

● Merged profiles turned duplicate chaos into Ultra VIP clarity: Before Revinate's identity resolution tools were fully deployed at Casa de Campo, the same guest could appear four or five times in the database — each profile distinguished by a period, an extra letter, or a formatting variation. Once merged, the data told a completely different story. For the resort's 50th anniversary, the team was able to identify and segment guests who had visited repeatedly, experienced multiple facets of the property, and truly embodied the Casa de Campo guest, creating a campaign that would not have been possible with fragmented data.

● Placeholder email addresses are the silent database killer: Bailey and Gitti both flag the practice of filling email fields with dummy addresses just to satisfy a form field. Beyond the obvious deliverability damage, it corrupts the profile data that every downstream campaign relies on. Gitti's approach: teach the team not just what to do, but why it matters and what breaks when they do it wrong.

● Clean data is a team sport that starts with reservations: Casa de Campo's data SOPs cover the entire guest journey — what to request, how to ask, how to enter data without typos or inconsistent formatting, and when it is acceptable to move on without the information. Reservation agents are positioned as the foundational layer of the entire data operation, because they create the guest profile that every other touchpoint builds on.

● Understanding what you will actually use prevents data hoarding: A golf tournament contact list will always arrive with handicap numbers. Casa de Campo keeps the original file but removes irrelevant columns before importing because until you know how you will use data, you cannot know what you do not need. Reviewing marketing plans before deciding on data fields is the order of operations Gitti now recommends to anyone starting a segmentation strategy.

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Read the Hospitality Benchmark Report here: https://www.revinate.com/hospitality-benchmark-report/ 

[11:50] Why database health actually matters — Gitti opens with a decade of experience compressed into a few sentences. At Casa de Campo, the challenge was never just growing a database, it was making sense of an operation where golfers, polo spectators, equestrian guests, beach visitors, and concert-goers all generate data in different systems that historically never spoke to each other. "We had to find a streamlined way to differentiate all those guests. And that has been our biggest challenge and our biggest task — how to really identify them, and then create different segments." The benchmark report's database growth figures are the foundation. What Gitti describes is the decade of work required to turn that growth into something usable.

[22:48] The itinerary strategy that changed the guest experience — Before Casa de Campo invested seriously in email capture, guests would arrive with no dining reservations, no activities booked, and no awareness of what the property even offered. Gitti describes a guest discovering the shooting center on day four of a five-day stay and leaving before ever getting to use it. The fix was a pre-arrival itinerary program,  a vacation planner assigned to each guest, an email sent immediately after booking, and a standing invitation to shape the stay before arrival. "That improved our guest satisfaction by forty percent." The operational lever was one email address captured at the right moment.

[31:15] The OTA masked email problem — and what Casa de Campo did about it — Bailey presents the benchmark finding that 12% of North American email records are OTA-masked and set to expire within 20 to 30 days. For EMEA the figure is 34%. Gitti describes how the team launched an OTA win-back campaign after last year's NAVIGATE — a newsletter sign-up invitation with no offer, just a clear call to stay connected. "I think we have more emails than I thought we were gonna get." She makes the strategic point that drives the effort: finding out why a guest booked through the OTA in the first place, and then giving them a reason they cannot find there to book directly next time.

[43:40] How merged profiles unlocked the Ultra VIP segment — Gitti describes what the database looked like before systematic profile merging: the same guest appearing three, four, or five times across different records, each separated by a stray period, an extra character, or a formatting inconsistency. Once those profiles were unified, the picture changed entirely. For Casa de Campo's 50th anniversary, the team was able to identify guests who had visited repeatedly, experienced multiple areas of the resort, and truly represented the depth of the brand. "If we didn't have all those merged profiles, I don't think we would have been able to create that specific segment." Recognition, personalization, and the feeling of being seen as a returning guest all start with data that knows who someone actually is.

[44:55] Teaching the team to own the data — Gitti's most transferable lesson is a mindset. Reservation agents who fill email fields with placeholders because a form requires an entry are not being careless. They just do not understand what breaks when they do it. "Making sure they understand why. Not just because you're gonna complete the field to make me happy or make your boss happy, but why is it important, how it connects with everything else, and how it will break something else if you do it wrong." When the team understands the downstream impact of what they capture, the data quality changes and so does how they feel about their role in the guest experience.

Chapters:
00:00 - Intro

01:14 - About the 2026 Hospitality Benchmark Report

03:03 - Casa de Campo: 50 years, 7,000 acres, and a data challenge to match

07:20 - Database growth benchmarks and what they mean for marketing

10:43 - Why personalization and segmentation start with clean data

17:08 - The itinerary strategy that raised guest satisfaction by 40%

29:12 - OTA masked emails: the 12% problem and how to win those guests back