Marc Heyneker and the hotel that remembers you

Marc Heyneker wanted a boat. Revinate had an Amsterdam office, and he had an idea of what a company with an Amsterdam office ought to do with it. He and colleague Martin Plessman bought one as a surprise for the team. Employees could learn to captain it. Software had brought them to the city; now there was a reason to look up from the software.

It is a useful place to begin with Heyneker. His career contains the expected machinery of a technology business: sales, product launches, acquisitions, pricing decisions, a change of chief executive. It also contains people who knew him long before their names appeared together in a press release. A school friend helped start the company. An early adviser eventually took over running it. A customer carried its product to another country.

Revinate’s business concerns what hotels remember about their guests. Heyneker’s story has its own long memory.

Two school friends, one unfinished problem

Before Revinate, Heyneker worked in sales at Akamai Technologies. His eventual co-founder, Jay Ashton, had been president of Five Star Alliance, an online travel agency for luxury hotels. They were school friends who brought different professional experience to the same industry. In 2009, they founded Revinate.

The initial product addressed online reputation. Guests were describing their stays on review sites and social networks, producing feedback that hotel teams needed to organize and act upon. A hotel could have a perfectly tidy reception desk while its public reputation scattered itself across the internet.

Heyneker explained the stakes in 2012: “Their business lives and dies by guest satisfaction and quality service.” The comment came as he discussed the migration of guest feedback from private comment cards and surveys into public online conversations. Hospitality had always depended on what visitors thought. Technology was changing where they said it and who could hear.

An early customer gives that argument a human scale. While validating the market, Heyneker and Ashton met Valeriano Antonioni, then working on a hotel project in Arizona. Antonioni became one of the early believers. When he moved to Florence to lead the Lungarno Collection, he brought Revinate with him. The collection became its first client in Italy.

For Antonioni, the attraction was an organized, proactive way to manage reputation across the hotels. The founders could describe a market opportunity. He could describe work he no longer wanted to do manually. The product had earned a place in his next job.

The guest leaves a trail

Reviews were a beginning. By the end of 2017, Heyneker was explaining why Revinate had moved into email marketing. His argument concerned the economics of the hotel itself: rising costs, revenue passing through online travel agencies, and the importance of bookings made directly with the property.

A guest who had already stayed offered a different starting point from an anonymous prospective customer. The hotel had a relationship to work with. Revinate’s marketing tools could help it use information about past stays to communicate with more relevant groups of guests, rather than send everyone the same invitation.

There is a modest courtesy inside that commercial logic. An offer has a better chance of being welcome when someone has thought about who is receiving it. A hotel email is rarely anyone’s literary highlight of the week. It can, at least, have a reason to arrive.

In January 2020, Revinate launched its Guest Data Platform. It was designed to combine and clean information from systems such as property management, point of sale, and loyalty software into a fuller guest profile. Hotels and groups could use that information across marketing and guest experience work.

The practical problem was fragmentation. Different systems could each hold something useful about the same visitor. Bringing those records together gave a hotel a way to see more than the transaction immediately in front of it. For Heyneker, that extended an argument he had been making about the person behind the booking.

A bigger desk in 2015

Heyneker’s responsibilities changed before the platform did. In November 2015, Revinate announced that he would become CEO. He had previously been its global vice president of sales. Ashton, the outgoing CEO, became chief product officer.

The arrangement put the commercial co-founder in charge of the business and gave Ashton a dedicated product role. Heyneker emphasized Ashton’s enthusiasm for the products and his responsibility for their development. A company built by friends was assigning its next set of jobs.

That date matters to the shape of the career. Heyneker’s involvement runs back to the founding in 2009; his period as CEO begins with the 2015 transition. There were six years of building the company before he took its top operating role, then more than eight years in that role before he became chairman.

The business also acquired public recognition during his tenure. In early 2020, Revinate announced another top-ten placement among the Best Places to Work in Hotel Tech. Its marketing product won the HotelTechAward for hotel email marketing and CRM for the second consecutive year. Customer relationships and employee experience were both visible parts of the company’s progress.

When the guest picks up the phone

In 2021, Heyneker led Revinate through two acquisitions that broadened how it could serve hotels. NAVIS brought reservation sales software and services, adding voice-channel capabilities to Revinate’s guest data and marketing business. Heyneker continued as CEO of the combined company.

Later that year, Revinate acquired Go Moment, whose Ivy digital concierge provided automated guest messaging and commerce. Go Moment CEO Raj Singh joined the leadership team as chief strategy officer.

The two deals brought different kinds of conversations into the same business. An email campaign, a reservation call, and a message during a stay happen at different moments. The company’s proposition was that guest information could support each of them. The person calling about a booking did not become a different customer upon opening a text.

By October 2022, Heyneker was describing the combination of the three companies as a way to connect communications across the guest journey. Revinate’s ambitions now reached beyond listening to what a guest said after departure. They included helping a hotel communicate before, during, and after the visit.

“The people are your company.”

Marc Heyneker

The boat is part of the business

Inside the company, the relationships had their own rituals. Chief People Officer Kelly Buchanan described Heyneker as a leader who put people first and communicated well. Revinate ran employee awards and a recognition program called “top banana,” through which colleagues could nominate someone who had gone beyond the ordinary demands of a job.

The name is agreeably unserious. Recognition need not sound like a procurement category to count. Buchanan also described monthly all-hands meetings that mixed business updates with appreciation for teams and their work.

The Amsterdam boat belongs in that company. Heyneker, a dual US and Dutch citizen, had a personal connection to the Netherlands. A local perk gave the international office a tradition of its own. Someone still had to learn to steer. The team got an experience to share, with considerably better scenery than a slide deck.

These details make his interest in hospitality easier to understand. The product asks hotels to pay attention to guests as people. The workplace traditions suggest an interest in giving colleagues something particular to remember, too. That is a reading of his approach, rather than a formula for company culture.

A price, a plan, and fewer squirrels

Heyneker’s published advice to founders is practical and occasionally impatient with distraction. He recommends understanding operating measurements, making executives responsible for their areas, and maintaining both one-year and three-year plans. He gives pricing, packaging, and monetization an explicit place early in the business.

He also counsels simplicity and focus. His warning about chasing squirrels gives the reader an animal to picture the next time an attractive new project runs across a meeting.

The advice fits a business that had expanded into several products and channels. More possibilities create more decisions. A roadmap must give people a reason to choose one piece of work before another. A pricing model must make the product understandable to the person buying it.

His work with Serent Capital offers a specific example. In its 2022 review, the investor highlighted Revinate’s pricing work; Heyneker described measuring the impact of changes with Serent’s support. The glamorous sentence in a founder biography is usually about vision. Here, the useful sentence concerns checking what happened after a decision.

The adviser gets the keys

On March 12, 2024, Revinate announced Bryson Koehler as CEO and Heyneker as chairman of the board. Koehler had been connected to the founders before the company began, through the Akamai and hospitality technology worlds. At IHG, he had worked on revenue and guest technology, bringing an industry perspective to their early discussions.

His subsequent career included technology leadership at The Weather Company, IBM, and Equifax. The new CEO arrived with experience in data businesses and a longstanding acquaintance with Revinate’s ambitions. Heyneker’s succession connected an early conversation to a later responsibility.

At the handoff, Revinate reported more than 12,000 hotel customers and $12.8 billion in direct revenue generated by its customers. Those were company-reported platform figures. They describe the scale of the business at that moment, rather than Heyneker’s personal earnings or the company’s revenue.

He remains listed as co-founder and chairman. The continuing role makes the ending less tidy than a founder riding into the sunset. There is a board to help lead and a business whose next decisions still matter to him.

There is also time for the pursuits he enjoys: golf, skiing, fly fishing, travel, music, family, and friends. They fit the person who wanted an Amsterdam office to have a boat. Years spent building software for hospitality have left him with an appetite for the experiences on the other side of the screen.