As a voluntary chain, Stays cannot take loyalty for granted. They have to earn it again and again – with the same platform behind them since 2017.
8. juni 2026
Stays (formerly Small Danish Hotels) is not a chain in the traditional sense. The more than 70 hotels and inns are independent and join voluntarily. That places a fundamental demand on the organisation behind them: you have to be able to answer, continuously, why it is worth being part of it.
The key is the concept. The Benefits loyalty club is one of the load-bearing elements giving the affiliated hotels advantages they could not easily create on their own. As a small hotel it is not realistic to run a loyalty club that genuinely moves the needle – that requires a shared platform, shared data and a communication engine that can reach guests across the whole chain.
When Benefits launched in January 2017, Stays faced a practical problem of some size: the hotels used seven different booking systems, and each system was used differently from hotel to hotel. A loyalty club that awards points automatically regardless of system and check-in method requires everything to talk to everything else. And the setup at the time did not deliver that. There were no trigger-based journeys – everything was set up manually. The need for a different solution was pressing, both in relation to the market and in relation to retaining guests and tying the hotels more closely to the chain.
The collaboration with Yulsn started more than ten years ago with a clear purpose: to tie things together technically. The most important need to solve was system integration – connecting emails and data into one combined setup.
Today Yulsn's platform is the technical backbone behind the Benefits club and the newsletter communication.
The system handles the integrations to every hotel's booking system, automated journeys for earning points and signing up, and it gathers content from eight different sources, all of which can be pulled directly into the communication. On top of that there is a direct integration to Stays' booking system supporting the ongoing settlement of points usage between the chain and the individual hotels.
Reporting is a central element. Stays documents and reports Benefits-related revenue figures to the hotels on an ongoing basis – not merely as internal management information, but as a concrete argument that being part of the chain pays off. For that purpose the system holds a combination of standard reports and tailored Power BI dashboards, giving an overview that would otherwise take a great deal of manual work to assemble.
The platform is used across functions internally. On the administrative side, staff work with commission calculations, data extracts and monthly settlements. On the marketing side, the system is used to produce and send newsletters and campaign emails to the Benefits club's many thousands of members – with segmentation based on guests' interests, direct access to booking data, and an overview of which elements in a given newsletter generate clicks.
This is a job handled by a chain office of 12 people in total – who, besides marketing, also look after administration, finance, booking and sales for the entire chain. That the system is easy to work with and can be run independently is not a nice extra – it is a precondition.
The platform's robustness showed itself particularly in practice when the Covid lockdown hit overnight in March 2020. There were suddenly no stays to sell and almost no staff at work.
Within a few days a new solution was in place, so that even the managing director could set up a weekly newsletter with a hotel portrait in minutes, simply by entering the hotel's ID and making a few choices directly in the email builder. The setup was built on data that was already synchronised in the system.
And it was possible because the foundation held. Because a dedicated team was ready who knew it well enough to find a way quickly.
Behind the day-to-day running there is close collaboration with the people at Yulsn. The detailed grasp of Stays' setup and history is highlighted as extraordinarily valuable. As Helle Skou Nørby, who has daily responsibility for the Benefits club, puts it:
„It means a lot that Yulsn can remember our history. It has saved us many times.“
Stays has a fixed primary contact at Yulsn alongside the team working daily on facets of their solution. And availability is an important factor. “I can always tell that we are prioritised”, says Helle Skou Nørby.
The Benefits club today has over 162,000 active members, and Benefits-related revenue runs at 125 million kroner a year. Figures reported directly to the hotels as documentation of the club's commercial effect.
“It is gold for our marketing department that we have been given the ability to send something out to so many people,” says Helle Skou Nørby.
The overall setup largely runs itself. The marketing team sends an average of seven newsletters a week, and three of the quick booking emails can be produced in an hour.
A focused effort to optimise processes and systems over three years reduced the time spent on email marketing by 88 per cent – from around 125 hours a month to 15. Over the same period direct sales from email rose by 44 per cent.
Communication with guests has been made steadily more targeted. Welcome flows are set up in up to twelve variants depending on where the sign-up came from. Guests who have not stayed for six months are activated automatically with content matched to their interest profile. And through sparring with Yulsn the sending strategy has been sharpened along the way. As Helle Skou Nørby says:
“We have had good guidance on how to send more targeted emails, so guests are not bombarded with content they are not interested in.”
The voluntary structure at Stays requires there to be a real reason to stay. And they deliver one. To their hotels and inns – and to their guests.
Stays has a clear vision for communication with guests: always to bring content that is as relevant as possible, across audiences and stages of their customer journey. It is a direction worked towards continuously, with each new short-term plan as a step forward.
And the foundation is in place: integrations, automation, data and overview. One concrete next step is to streamline the reporting further by gathering all data in a data warehouse, so the figures become faster and more reliable to work with – and easier to document to the hotels.
It is now about continuing the development work that over the past ten years has made the Benefits club what it is today.