Technology
Nick Slavin: The CEO of Curacity’s Goal of Revolutionizing the Hotel Industry
Who Is Nick Slavin?
Nick Slavin is the CEO and Co-Founder of Curacity, a platform that pairs content creators with hotels. The business has seen success in the influencer marketing industry and beyond, forming partnerships with premium brands such as Preferred Hotels & Resorts. The Co-Founder explains how he used his previous knowledge of the hotel industry to build a prosperous creator marketplace.
“We started Curacity in its current iteration a little over five years ago. My background is as a Portfolio Manager at Starwood Capital Group, managing their opportunity funds that focused on making hotel investments. Throughout that experience, I very quickly saw how challenged hotels, particularly new hotels that didn’t have any sort of built-in guest database, were at acquiring really great guests at scale. I also realized how much hotels looked to tap into the power of really great content but how challenged they were in doing so.”
Curacity’s Expansion With Brand Partnerships
Slavin goes on to describe how the recent partnership with Preferred Hotels & Resorts has driven its customer acquisition process to new heights.
“Preferred Hotels is a very prominent and excellent hotel marketing association with over 700 hotels in their portfolio and they help to support in various ways. If we go back to how the idea was born, we’ve worked with a number of Preferred Hotels and we’ve seen such tremendous success. Having helped many of their properties leverage content to drive bookings, we wanted to form a more official partnership. So we contacted their corporate team to structure a deal that would allow us to work with any individual hotel, part of the Preferred Hotels portfolio, that wanted to supercharge content as a customer acquisition channel.”
He continues to give more insight into the workings of this operation.
“We work with the corporate arm of the Preferred Hotels team and they present our product suite to all of their properties. They do an excellent job of bringing the best vendors to their hotels. We’re thrilled to be recognized as a partner that can meaningfully change the way hotels acquire excellent guests.”
Using Creators To Drive Loyalty in the Hotel Industry
Curacity has worked alongside 20,000 vetted creators and has generated over $250 million for some of the world’s leading hotels. Slavin goes on to describe how influencer marketing is responsible for this success.
“Our guests are being driven to the hotel through excellent content created by the world’s best digital media brands and the world’s best social media creators. Their content does a much better job than an online travel agency or other platforms at informing and exciting those guests. We see it in the numbers. Guests spend more and they’re happier and we can do it all at one of the industry’s lowest blended commission costs.”
He continues to explore his hopes for industry-wide expansion.
“We want to spread that benefit to all of Preferred Hotels, ultimately. I want each one of those hotels to benefit from the products we’ve built to service their exact needs. Tapping into the revenue-driving power of top of funnel marketing has been the Holy Grail of the hotel world for a long time and we help all of our hotel partners to not only generate excellent ROI from content, our digital media brands, and our social media creators, but to get world-class content created in the process.”
Maximizing ROI During Financial Uncertainty
Although many brands are dreading a looming economic downturn, Curacity promises to offer its partners incredible success, no matter the financial forecast.
“We’ve put hundreds of creators through hotel rooms and typically what we like to see is about 10 to 1 ROI across our social media creators and similar numbers across artificial media prints. As the world seems to be moving further into recession territory, accountability for every dollar spent will become an even bigger priority. Our products, with the clarity they provide around ROI and the scale at which we can get excellent content created, will become more and more standard for the industry.”
Slavin’s Ambitious Appetite for Future Success
With an incredible partnership under its belt, Curacity is becoming a truly competitive force to be reckoned with. But Nick Slavin still has a collection of goals he would like to see the brand achieve.
“We have an ambitious three-year plan. There are more than 15,004 five-star hotels in the world I’d like to service and I’d like every fantastic digital media brand to work with us. I would like all 200 million social media creators to get a chance to stay in these hotels. Those are big numbers and luckily we have built an excellent and capable team and we’re looking to onboard as many enterprise accounts like Preferred Hotels in the future as we can.”
