Nemacolin Woodlands Resort
Background
Nestled in Pennsylvania’s Laurel Highlights, Nemacolin Woodlands Resort is ideally situated for weeklong and weekend getaways all year round. The five-star resort boasts a wide range of activities from golf and fine dining, spa amenities, skiing and snowboarding, paintball, a ropes course, off-road driving, and many others. While Nemacolin maintained strong revenue share in its B2C market, in early 2014 the resort’s leadership decided to make a stronger play for B2B clients in the corporate meeting space. Despite serving more than 135,000 leisure guests per year and having myriad business amenities, Nemacolin simply wasn’t making headway into the B2B market and within the Washington, DC, metro area.
Challenge
To enhance Nemacolin’s visibility in the DC metro area and to increase corporate bookings, which would strengthen the resort’s portfolio and drive additional revenue. Additionally, Nemacolin wanted to win a bid to host a major network reality television competition, and needed additional portfolio growth to secure that bid.
Solution
growth[period] used a three-pronged approach in helping Nemacolin meet their business development goals. Initially, growth[period] executives worked with Dennis Noonan, a vice president for sales and marketing at Nemacolin, to refine the company’s vision of the ideal corporate client and determine the most effective way for the resort to position itself within the Metro DC corporate market.
[growth]period then organized numerous strategic networking events for executives at Nemacolin. In addition to ensuring that Nemacolin was included at customer-sponsored networking events, growth[period] ran several strategic, private networking events on the resort’s behalf.
Finally, [growth]period acted as strategic growth advisors during Nemacolin’s repositioning and expansion period. Members of growth[period] were available to company business leaders for strategy sessions, meeting and bid preparation, and other functions.
Results
As a result of working with growth[period], Nemacolin has gained a greater market share of the Metro DC corporate meeting space. The private networking events in particular provided a wealth of new business opportunities, which led to incredible conversion rates. For example, 74% of attendees at one growth[period] event subsequently visited and stated at Nemacolin as a direct result of the strategy devised by growth[period]. Roughly one-third of those attendees subsequently booked a corporate event at the resort. Nemacolin not only gained valuable DC metro market share – it boosted its presence internationally as well. Thanks in part to growth[period]’s work, the resort successfully was featured on The Bachelorette in 2014.
