From on-the-day chaos
to a pre-paid engine.

Chris Loock, CMO of FINNS Beach Club, in conversation with Clubtech. Lightly edited from the interview captions for readability.

I'm the marketing director here at FINNS — the CMO. My role here is revenue generation for the business: ensuring we have the place booked out all the time, and driving our priority-entry tickets for the venue as well.

Ten years ago, when FINNS started in Canggu, it was mainly all walk-in traffic. We didn't even really have a booking system — we would just advertise the venue, mainly with on-street advertising: billboards and those traditional media channels.

So we started looking at ways we could implement a booking engine that could sell better to people, and allow us to generate revenue much further in advance as well. What we found is we could really drive that revenue super early — lock in cash flow for the business.

We worked very closely with the Clubtech team to build this. Because we're such a high-volume venue, we're a bit of a unique case. We're quite entrepreneurial in terms of our ownership group and our executives, so we're a fast-moving business. For us it was a perfect synergy with Clubtech, because we were able to help create this product from scratch and actually tailor it to what we do here at FINNS. We were heavily involved in that process — testing the UI with guests, testing it with focus groups prior to launch, and really finding what works for us, developing that front end in a way that could really convert for us.

You go to these pre-existing providers and it's a set-and-forget model. Essentially there's no customization, or very little customization — you come in, you get what you get out of the box, and that's it. That didn't really work for us, because we have so many different products. Being able to customize and build a platform that really works for us — that's how the Clubtech synergy came about.

That's where the key really comes in — that's the magic of Clubtech: being able to measure your success. Guests can really understand what the product is and what they're going to get before they buy it, and that gives them the confidence to buy. Even with daybeds — you're paying three million-plus rupiah for a daybed — people really want to know what they're going to get.

We looked at it from an e-commerce standpoint: if you're selling earrings or a necklace, you want to really show what they look like on the person. Taking some of those e-commerce principles and putting them into a booking engine gives people more confidence that the product they're buying looks exciting, and they want to be part of it.

We pre-sell our beds before people even get to the booking engine. They watch our videos, then they land, and then they can scroll through the product, TikTok-style — and it really sells it well to them. I think that's been a real differentiator for us versus the traditional booking engines. The whole process, from beginning to end, is tailored to giving the customer reassurance — and to higher conversion. Essentially, that's what we built it for.

The way we visually put the booking engine out there created a platform people could have confidence in, because they land there and see: I want to go and sit here on the map. They can scroll all the options. We see people spend up to five to ten minutes on the Clubtech map. We were pioneers, even globally, in putting this kind of tech out there — so in the initial stages we just trusted the process and adopted things as we went. That's been the best thing about working with Clubtech: the customization has been a lot easier than with traditional platforms, which are quite rigid.

We finally got a really good tracking system backing the Clubtech platform. If you go to any venue and say, "I'm going to give you a digital platform that gives your customers reassurance, lets you track your success accurately, and lets you tailor your advertising to drive better results" — that's already a better proposition to go to people with. The ability to customize products along the way with the Clubtech team has really given us confidence in what we can create with the platform.

It's almost treating the guest the way you would treat them when they arrive in the venue, but online. That's what we've now got with Clubtech: if you land on it, you can really experience what it feels like to be at the venue. That's always been a difficult thing for digital marketers to do, and Clubtech lets us do it in one of the best ways of any platform we've come across.

I never like to go into any situation where I can't track my revenue or my results — because then I can't go to my boss and say, "This is what we achieved this month; this is how much revenue we've generated." That is my value to the business. If I have a platform that helps me facilitate that, it gives me confidence in doing my job — and when I have that, I can get better results for the business. That's what this whole thing does for us. It's not going to do the marketing for you, but what it will do is help you with the conversion.

Hospitality is about the one-percenters — the one-percenters no one else wants to do. And we go to the one-percenters in our content. When people watch it, they think: that's really cool, we didn't know that — that's amazing that they do that. Those little things are what make people go, "this place is different." And hospitality translates from digital to actually being in the venue. All the nice things you do in the venue — you can't do them if the people aren't there. So you need to translate that into everything you do, end to end.

If you go to any high-level marketer and say, "I'm going to give you a platform that facilitates sales in a way that translates directly from your acquisition channels — you land on a page that looks very similar to what you're doing with your marketing" — then it's much easier to sell that product. Having the tracking, and that e-commerce approach we talked about earlier, and being able to put that on the table and say, "these are the results we achieved." And for a guest to be able to click on the bed, get a 360° view of where they're sitting, and see exactly what they're going to get — giving them that confidence — I think that's the real differentiator here.

We've put a lot of time and effort, working with Clubtech, into how to really increase conversion — reducing steps to purchase, all the little things that set-and-forget booking platforms are not doing. So the key differentiator for me is measurable results, really good key visuals that sell the product, and an easy flow through the funnel — from acquisition to consideration to purchase. That's where Clubtech really shines and sets itself apart from other big brands.