How Solotel uses Lexer to take the guesswork out of hospitality marketing

Solotel is one of Sydney's most recognised hospitality groups. Founded in 1986, the family-owned business operates more than 30 venues across Sydney and Brisbane, spanning everything from iconic waterfront restaurants to neighbourhood pubs and late-night bars. 

With a venue network both large and diverse, understanding who your guests are, across dozens of locations, booking engines, and dining formats, is not a simple problem. Different venues attract different customers. Different customers have different behaviours, preferences, and visit frequencies. And the data to understand all of that had, for a long time, been sitting in silos with no way to connect it.‍

The challenge: data rich, decision poor

Solotel had no shortage of data. Booking engines, email systems, loyalty programmes, point of sale, reservation platforms: the information existed. The problem was that none of it talked to each other.

Justin describes the situation plainly: Solotel was "data rich but data dumb." The goal when he joined was to "get our data to actually work for us” by bringing it all into one place.

What Solotel uses Lexer for

1. Replacing opinion with data in strategic decisions

Before Lexer, strategic decisions about venue performance, marketing direction, and guest behaviour relied heavily on gut feel and internal debate. Now, the data provides a foundation. Teams can see concrete behaviours: which drinks guests prefer, when they visit, how often they return, and what their visit frequency looks like across different venue types.

That confidence changes how decisions get made, and who gets to make them.

2. Precision segmentation: the butter knife versus the scalpel

One of the most valuable tools has been audience segmentation. As Justin explains, basic segmentation, the kind you can do in a CRM or a spreadsheet, is a butter knife. It gets the job done, roughly. Lexer is the scalpel.

The difference is granularity. Solotel can slice their customer data at the product level, by venue, by visit behaviour, by spend, and then push those audiences to platforms like Meta for targeting. A broad email list becomes a precisely defined segment. A generic ad audience becomes a group of actual guests with a specific behaviour pattern.

As a practical example, Justin describes targeting guests ahead of Chinese New Year by pulling the top 20 Chinese surnames from Lexer to understand what those guests were actually ordering. That kind of granularity is not available in a standard CRM or email platform. It requires a customer insights platform built to work at that level of detail.

3. The Aperol Spritz campaign: letting data change the offer

One of the clearest examples of data changing a decision in real time involves North Bondi Fish.

Solotel planned to use a margarita as the hero offer for a win-back campaign targeting dormant customers. It seemed like a reasonable choice for a beachside venue. The Lexer data said otherwise.

When the team pulled the actual ordering behaviour for that venue's customer base, margaritas ranked third. The Aperol Spritz was the most popular drink by a significant margin.

Solotel changed the offer. The Aperol Spritz campaign went out instead, and it delivered a measurable bump in conversion rate.

The insight is simple in hindsight: send people an offer based on what they actually like, and more of them will act on it. The point is that without access to granular customer data, Solotel would have gone with the margarita, and the campaign would have been less effective. Data removed the guesswork.

4. Finding the loyalty tipping point

One of the more strategically significant findings Lexer has helped Solotel surface is what Justin calls the "magic number": the number of visits that turns a casual guest into a loyal regular.

That tipping point differs between venue types. The number of visits it takes to convert a pub guest into a local is different from the number it takes for a restaurant guest. Knowing that number matters because it tells the marketing team where to focus retention effort: on guests who are close to crossing the threshold, not on those who have already crossed it or those who are unlikely to.

This kind of insight, built from actual visit frequency data across a large multi-venue network, sits at the core of what a customer data platform makes possible. It is not available from a booking engine report or an email open rate.

5. A 24% reduction in cost per acquisition

Solotel runs acquisition campaigns on Meta, TikTok, and Google across their venues. The standard approach on those platforms uses interest-based audiences, which cast a wide net. The problem is that existing customers, people who have already visited a venue, are included in that net. They see acquisition ads when what they actually need is retention messaging. Budget is spent reaching people who are already customers.

Solotel used Lexer customer data to build negative audiences: lists of existing customers that are suppressed from acquisition campaigns. The result is that acquisition spend only reaches people who have never visited those venues.

The impact: a 24% drop in cost per acquisition, year on year.

The mechanism is straightforward. Most teams focus on building better lookalike audiences to improve ROAS. Suppressing existing customers from acquisition targeting removes wasted spend from the equation entirely. The customer acquisition platform makes that suppression possible at scale, across every campaign.

6. Cross-departmental use: bringing food and beverage teams into the data

Lexer's impact at Solotel is not contained to the marketing team. Insights from the platform are shared with food and beverage (F&B) teams to inform product and menu decisions.

The Aperol Spritz example is one instance. More broadly, when customer data shows what guests are ordering, when they are ordering it, and how that differs by venue, that information becomes useful to the people designing menus and planning beverage ranges. Marketing data becomes operational intelligence.

Justin also notes that Solotel uses Experian data layered over their customer data to help assess the potential of new venues before acquisition. Combining first-party customer behaviour with Experian's third-party demographic data gives the business a picture of who is likely to live and spend in a target area, reducing the risk of entering a new market on instinct alone. In Justin's words: "hope is not a strategy."

How Solotel approaches platform ownership

Justin applies what he calls a 90/10 rule to Lexer adoption across the organisation.

Ten percent of users will use 90% of the platform's features. The remaining 90% only need to engage with the 10% of the platform that is directly relevant to their role. 

A guest relations manager does not need to understand the full segmentation suite; they need to be able to track and serve top VIPs. That is the part they should learn well.

This framing reduces the onboarding burden and sets realistic expectations across a large, multi-venue team. It also means the platform gets used consistently, rather than adopted intensively by one team and ignored by everyone else.

On time commitment, Justin suggests at least an hour or two per week for day-to-day use such as checking dashboards or reviewing segments. During reporting weeks or special projects, that increases. A "super user" building audience profiles for a new venue acquisition might spend up to 20 hours in a single week. The platform scales to whatever the task requires.

Advice for teams considering Lexer

For hospitality operators thinking about implementing a hospitality customer data platform, Justin's advice is direct.

First, expect some friction during onboarding, but understand where it typically comes from. In Solotel's experience, the friction rarely comes from Lexer itself. It comes from third-party data providers whose data infrastructure is not ready to connect. His recommendation: speak to those platforms early, understand their data setup, and get that conversation started before contracts are signed.

Second, on the broader question of whether to proceed: "I would say don't think, just do."

He describes Lexer as an "insurance policy" for any hospitality business entering a new market or launching a new venue. Basing those decisions on customer fact and behaviour, rather than opinion, is the difference between a strategy and a hope.

Book a demo

Ready to see what Lexer can do for your hospitality business? Book a demo and we will show you how operators like Solotel are using customer data to reduce acquisition costs, sharpen campaign targeting, and build lasting guest loyalty.