How The Claremont turned haunted lore into hotel demand

The best booking strategy might be hiding in your hotel’s history. At the Claremont, ghost stories became luxury October tours that sold out in just six days. In the 200th episode of Hotel Moment, Karen Stephens sits down with Mickey Stout, Director of Marketing at Claremont Resort & Club, to explore how the resort turned its unique history into demand.

Karen and Mickey unpack how influencer trips created a 200-person waitlist, how longtime employees helped uncover bookable stories, and how seasonal experiences can drive more guest spend.

They also dive into how clean guest data helps turn one-time tour guests into repeat visitors across dining, wellness, stays, and club memberships. Because the right experience can drive the first booking. The right data can drive the next one.

Meet your host

Karen Stephens

As Chief Marketing Officer at Revinate, Karen is focused on driving long-term growth by building Revinate’s brand equity, product marketing, and customer acquisition strategies. Her deep connections with hospitality industry leaders play a key role in crafting strategic partnerships. Karen has more than 25 years of expertise in global hospitality technology and online distribution — including managing global accounts in travel and hospitality organizations such as Travelocity and lastminute.com

As the host of The Hotel Moment podcast, she interviews top players in the hospitality industry. Karen has been with Revinate for over 11 years, leading our global GTM teams. Her most recent transition was from Chief Revenue Officer, where she led the team in their highest booking quarter to date in Q4 2023.

Watch the video

Transcript

[00:00:00] Mickey Stout: You’ll see some of the stories or hear some of the stories of Mrs. Thornburg. She is known to be walking the halls. She loved the property so much that she can’t leave, so she roams the halls in her nightgown and reminisces about the time she was here.

[00:00:25] Karen Stephens: Welcome to the Hotel Moment podcast presented by Revinate. I’m Karen Stephens, Chief Marketing Officer, joining you from sunny San Francisco, California.

[00:00:33] Dylan Cole: And I’m Dylan Cole, Managing Director of Revinate Europe, calling in from Amsterdam.

[00:00:38] Karen Stephens: This is the podcast where we explore how technology shapes every moment of the hotelier’s experience, and more importantly, how the right technology delivers real outcomes for hotel teams and guests alike.

[00:00:49] Dylan Cole: From revenue strategy and guest communication to operations and marketing, we sit down with the people transforming hospitality around the world.

[00:00:57] Karen Stephens: Depending on the conversation, sometimes it’ll just be me behind the mic.

[00:01:01] Dylan Cole: And sometimes it’ll be me, bringing a European perspective and stories from across the global hospitality industry.

[00:01:07] Karen Stephens: Whether you’re a hotelier, a tech enthusiast, or just curious about where hospitality is headed.

[00:01:13] Dylan Cole: You’re in the right place. Let’s get into it.

[00:01:16] Karen Stephens: Hello and welcome to the Hotel Moment Podcast. I’m your host, Karen Stephens, the Chief Marketing Officer of Revinate, and today we’re doing something a little special and a little different as we celebrate our 200th episode. To mark the occasion, we wanted to highlight a great hotelier and a truly historic property with a story filled with fascinating history, haunted lore, and plenty of character: the Claremont Resort & Club. And while the Claremont may have some spooky stories to tell, it’s also a beautiful place to stay and experience well beyond spooky season. So today we’re excited to welcome Mickey Stout, Director of Marketing at Claremont Resort & Club, with more than 20 years of experience across marketing, PR, brand development, and hospitality. Mickey now leads the marketing for a resort with more than a century of history and, fittingly for today’s episode, plenty of haunted stories to go with it. And be sure to join us soon for a special commemorative episode celebrating 200 Conversations of Hotel Moment, featuring some of our favorite conversations and moments that we’ve shared on the podcast along the way. So without further ado, welcome to the podcast, Mickey.

[00:02:21] Mickey Stout: Happy to be here.

[00:02:23] Karen Stephens: So Mickey, before we get into the ghosts, you’ve spent more than 20 years across marketing, PR, and brand development. What eventually brought you into hospitality and to a historic property like the Claremont?

[00:02:35] Mickey Stout: Well, funny story is I like to call myself a boomerang because I used to work here 20 years ago when I started in hospitality. Actually, my mother is in hospitality — she’s been in hotels for 40-plus years, so I pretty much grew up in a hotel. I worked as a gift shop cashier in a hotel when I was 14, so I kind of grew up in operations. I worked as a PBX operator, I worked front desk, I worked throughout high school and college at the front desk and front office. And as I was growing up, I told my mom — I’m an East Bay gal — I told my mom that one day I was going to work at the “White Castle on the Hill,” which was the Claremont. I think I was five years old when I first said that. And I went to school for marketing, and I graduated on Saturday and I was offered the job at the Claremont on Monday. So I had two days off. Started as a marketing coordinator at the Claremont and did that for a few years. I left the hospitality industry for about 11 years. I never thought I’d come back. A lot of people were like, “Great, you got out of the industry because it’s not for the weak.” And I never thought I’d come back, and here I am. I mean, it’s been 11 years, and I’m back at the Claremont. It’s definitely a special place. A lot of people have come back. There’s a lot of us that call ourselves the boomerangs, and it’s just a special place that kind of pulls us back. It definitely felt like a homecoming and definitely feels like a homecoming, and this is where I’m supposed to be.

[00:04:11] Karen Stephens: I love that. Talk about manifestation at five years old, like “That’s going to be my spot.” So let’s just talk a little bit about the Claremont for those who aren’t familiar with it. So you mentioned “White Castle on the Hill.” Give us a little bit about when the hotel was built and also everything that it encompasses in terms of the resort.

[00:04:27] Mickey Stout: Yeah, it was built in 1915 as a resort. Before that, it was actually a residence. So this was someone’s home. It was supposed to be like an English castle. It burned down, and I guess it was in ruins for a little bit. Two investors came. They were trying to decide what to do with the property. On a drunken day at a local bar, they were playing checkers and decided they were going to bet the property in a checkers match. So they played checkers, whoever won got full ownership of the property, and he decided he was going to turn it into a resort. So he won, decided he was going to open a resort, and in 1915, the Claremont became a resort. Right now, it has 276 rooms, a beautiful private club, three swimming pools. We do 70 Group X classes a week. It has four restaurant outlets. We do wonderful children’s activities. We have everything from paint-and-sip classes, wine dinners, jazz nights, really anything for any age. It’s just a wonderful community-based place in a wonderful setting and has probably the best views of San Francisco anywhere.

[00:05:52] Karen Stephens: Awesome. That’s great. So it’s over there in the East Bay Hills, which is really cool, near Berkeley.

[00:05:57] Mickey Stout: It’s half in Berkeley and half in Oakland.

[00:06:00] Karen Stephens: In Oakland.

[00:06:00] Mickey Stout: Yeah.

[00:06:01] Karen Stephens: Very cool. So you mentioned something there about the Claremont, that there was a fire on the original property, and obviously the hotel has been there for over a hundred years. So for someone who’s never heard the stories, what is the haunted lore surrounding the Claremont?

[00:06:16] Mickey Stout: For a building that’s been here for over a hundred years, there’s definitely lots of stories that come through here. Some of the stories that we’ve heard is there is a little girl that has been here. A lot of people have seen her through the halls, they hear her laughter, they see her playing with a ball down the hallways, they hear footsteps. They kind of feel her presence in the rooms. A few famous people have gone on record saying that they’ve heard or seen her. Tim Duncan from the Spurs went on ESPN talking about how he’s heard her or seen her while he stayed here, which was hilarious. That was when I was first here at the Claremont. Wanda Sykes and Jimmy Kimmel did a whole bit on his show about it as well. If you go on the tours, the haunted tours that we do here during October, you’ll see some of the stories or hear some of the stories of Mrs. Thornburg. She is known to be walking the halls. She loved the property so much that she can’t leave, so she roams the halls in her nightgown and reminisces about the time she was here. So those are some of the stories that people see or kind of feel while they’re here at nighttime.

[00:07:37] Karen Stephens: Right. So I’m most intrigued by the people who say they are seeing things. So this little girl, like, first of all, I’ve got to know: is this like a gauze-like person? Like is it like a ghostly situation, or do they actually think that they see like a solid life form? Have you got any reports on that?

[00:07:54] Mickey Stout: I have never seen her personally, but people see her like a child. I don’t think it’s ghostly, because I know that they come down reporting that they’ve seen a child and they don’t know where their parents are. So I think it looks like a real child, but they’re all friendly. They’re all very friendly. My Managing Director always says, “We’re in hospitality. They’re all friendly. There are no scary ghosts that are here.”

[00:08:19] Karen Stephens: Wow. And so you’ve been at — obviously, as you mentioned, you kind of grew up with the Claremont. You’ve seen it a lot. You used to work there as a teenager, etc. So have you ever heard or seen anything? Or does this stuff usually happen at night in the guest rooms? Like, have you seen it personally?

[00:08:32] Mickey Stout: I’ve never seen anything. I’ve definitely felt things. You know, I’ve had the hair on my neck stand up a little bit, or I’ve heard things. Actually, when we did our haunted tours, my marketing manager was filming the tours for some social clips. And when we were clipping the videos together, I was like, “Did you see footsteps in the video?” And she was like, “No.” So we kept looking and looking, and sure enough, you see footsteps trailing the tour and you could see like the carpet moving. I think that’s the first time I really saw something that kind of gave me the creeps a little bit, but it was kind of cool. Like as a marketer, I was like, “Whoa, we really caught something that we can put on our socials,” which was pretty exciting for me. But again, like I said, it’s nothing scary, it’s nothing harmful or anything like that. It was pretty cool.

[00:09:35] Karen Stephens: Yeah, so I love that you hit it on the head — you’re a marketer. Where most people are like, “Ooh,” you’re like, “Hey, how do we turn that into something cool?” So there’s a big difference between a haunted house and then again turning that into a guest experience thing. So when did you realize — was that the moment where you were like, “Hey, we could turn this into haunted tours,” or how did that idea come about to do the tours and to make it part of the guest experience?

[00:09:59] Mickey Stout: When I was here the first time, it was very taboo. Like no one talked about it, right? Back then it was, “We don’t confirm that we’re haunted. We never talk about it, we don’t market it. This is not something that we want to be known for.” It was not marketed. So when I came back and found out that they were doing tours, I wanted to lean very heavily on it. I wanted to market it pretty strongly. So I was only here for about six months or so when I suggested we do a FAM. So we did a little haunted FAM where we invited journalists, we invited media, we invited local influencers, where we gave them a little sneak peek of the tours. And we were only doing a few at the time, so we had like one spooky night. So they got to spend the night, they got to experience some of our outlets, but they got a little sneak peek of what the tour was like. They were able to video it so they could share it with their followers to really kind of help promote these tours. And it was a fun night. Like no one really got to experience what these were, and like I said, it wasn’t something really big yet. And once all the posting started happening, it just blew up. It became this thing where it’s like, “This is something you have to do in the Bay Area.” People were coming from like Sacramento, from Fresno, just to come check out these tours, and we just couldn’t keep up with the tours. I think we had a waitlist of 200 by the time the season was over. So by the next year, our poor concierge team just couldn’t keep up with the tours. And then this year, which is two years after the FAM hit, we sold out in six days. So it became this exciting thing where we now do a specialty cocktail in our outlets, we do overnight packages coupled with it, we do kind of a spooky tea — we call it “Witching Hour,” which is like a high tea, but at night with cocktails instead of tea. But we’re now kind of marketing it as like a “spooky season” versus just haunted tours. And I wanted to make sure it was just during October. Like, I don’t want to talk about haunted tours any time other than October. I don’t want it to lose the lore of it. I don’t want us to do haunted tours in February or anything like that. I want to keep that excitement just for our October season.

[00:12:41] Karen Stephens: I love that. A couple things I want to pick up on: one, how great that you used a familiarization trip, or FAM trip, to get all of the social influencers. I mean, it’s a relatively small investment to get that much marketing and word of mouth, and that is really cool. And then I love how you turned that into packages. So you mentioned a couple things there about combining it with room offers, combining it with cocktails, other things that can come onto the tour. And as you say, you’re sold out in six days, like dunzo.

[00:13:11] Mickey Stout: We sold out all the tickets in six days.

[00:13:13] Karen Stephens: Amazing. So for those of you listening, you better get on it for 2027, because 2026 is out. So Mickey, I would love to know, what is the haunted tour like? Is it the same every year? Do you change it up? Can you give us an idea of what you did last year?

[00:13:29] Mickey Stout: Sure. Every year it’s something different. We have to keep it fresh. There are so many stories that can be told since there are a lot of different haunted stories here. But last year, it was about Mrs. Thornburg. So she would take you through the halls, you would see the story of her and her roaming the halls, it would take you to the haunted room to see what that might look like if you were to come across one of the ghost spirits, and then they would take you up to the tower where you could see the beautiful 360 view of the Bay Area, which is a one-of-a-kind experience. It’s absolutely gorgeous up there. And then you would end the tour with a cocktail. This year is a little different. It does involve a bride, so that’s all I can tell you — you have to come check out the tour for that. But it is pretty spooky. It is 21 and over this year, so that just lets you know that it’s a bit spookier this year.

[00:14:27] Karen Stephens: I love it. This is like a classy haunted house.

[00:14:30] Mickey Stout: We like to call it a luxury haunted house.

[00:14:33] Karen Stephens: I love it. Very cool. Okay, I love it. Well, let’s switch gears, because as you mentioned, you know, you have spooky season where you lean into the haunted lore, but ultimately, the Claremont is a luxury resort. So how do you celebrate the other aspects of the hotel? For the rest of the year, what are you focused on as a marketer?

[00:14:51] Mickey Stout: What I love about the Claremont is there’s so many different aspects of the resort to celebrate, right? Like, it’s not just hotel rooms. There’s weddings, there’s meetings, there’s all the restaurants, there’s all the activations that we do. That’s the most fun thing to do here. But we also have a private club, which is memberships. So not only are we selling a weekend stay or someone’s celebration, we’re also selling a lifestyle. So, well, I guess we’re selling a lifestyle, not just a weekend stay, which I think is interesting. It adds another layer to marketing and another way of thinking about it. But also, we have to think about it as a whole and how to market all of that together, versus how to market each individual thing and having so many different stories. So I think that’s been a fun challenge for me: how do we tell the story of the Claremont without it sounding so segmented?

[00:15:51] Karen Stephens: Yeah, absolutely. And I’d love to dig into that a little bit more because, as you mentioned, you’ve got F&B, you’ve got fitness, you’ve got this longer-term club membership. So how do you stitch that all together? How do you make sure that your personalization is on point so that you’re giving it to the right audiences? Because as you said, there’s a lot of overlap, right?

[00:16:07] Mickey Stout: Yeah, there is. I think it’s finding out who is coming here, what they’re coming here for, and what else they could be interested in. I think having a CRM and finding out what that journey is is very important. A lot of times we might get stuck in like, “They came here for a haunted tour,” and we check that box, but we don’t want to keep them in that box. We want to see what else they’re interested in. Maybe they’re local and they want to come for a paint-and-sip, or maybe they want to come for a weekend getaway, or maybe this is a good person to prospect for a membership. There are opportunities to grab them to come and try the Claremont for other things. I think that’s what’s important — to see who this person is, what potential there is to market to, and what other opportunities I could show them that would be interesting at the Claremont, I guess.

[00:17:09] Karen Stephens: I love that. So you’ve got a historic hotel that’s got this haunted lore. And you know, again, I keep going back to the fact that you really are precise about kind of boxing that off for the season. So if another historic hotel is out there listening and wanted to turn its own unusual history into a bookable guest experience, what’s the first thing you would encourage the marketing team to think about?

[00:17:31] Mickey Stout: I think I would have them really figure out what that story is, make sure you have an interesting story, and make sure it’s something that someone would want to come and experience. Then I would talk to the employees that have been there for a long time and see what other stories there are. I think that’s what we did. We have so many employees here that have been here for 40-plus years. I think we’ve had 60-plus employees that have been here for 40-plus years. So that is a huge wealth of knowledge: What kind of stories can you tell me? What have you experienced? So you hear their stories and find little tidbits in there that could build onto this history, and see again if it’s something interesting and if someone would want to come stay here and experience that. And then you just kind of build off of that. I think that’s where I would start, definitely — kind of find that story and see if it’s unique enough to build an experience around.

[00:18:35] Karen Stephens: I love it. Thank you so much, Mickey. It’s been wonderful to talk to you, and I’m wishing you a very spooky October holiday season.

[00:18:42] Mickey Stout: Thank you. I wish you guys could come and experience it.

[00:18:45] Karen Stephens: Oh, I can.

[00:18:46] Mickey Stout: It’s really special.

[00:18:48] Karen Stephens: Great, thanks Mickey.

[00:18:49] Mickey Stout: You bet.

[00:18:54] Karen Stephens: Thank you for joining us on this episode of Hotel Moment by Revinate. Our community of hoteliers is growing every week, and each guest we speak to is tackling industry challenges with the innovation and flexibility that our industry demands. If you enjoyed today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and leave a review. And if you’re listening on YouTube, please like the video and subscribe for more content. For more information, head to revinate.com/hotelmomentpodcast. Until next time, keep innovating.

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