Overview
From hidden gem to local destination: relaunching a resort restaurant for the neighbors, not just the guests.
Hilton Grand Vacations had a problem most resorts know well. The restaurant inside the Éilan Hotel & Spa in San Antonio had been rebranded, redesigned and reopened as The Social at Éilan, but the city hadn't noticed. The previous concept, Sustenio, left behind a reputation that outlived the signage. The chef's Texas comfort food menu was excellent. Almost nobody local knew it existed.
HGV brought Bigeye in with one objective: make The Social a destination for the people who live and work within a few miles of it, not a convenience for people already checked in upstairs. Our discovery work defined the audience fast. High-density apartment residents nearby, suburban families looking for a reliable dinner spot, happy hour regulars, and the resort's own spa and fitness members. The brief we wrote called it a polished take on your best friend's backyard barbecue. That line became the creative north star for everything that followed.
Then we built the whole engine. Our team flew to San Antonio for a two-day on-site photo and video shoot that produced three months of social-ready content in one trip. We stood up a new Google Business Profile under The Social and retired the old listing so the search results finally matched the restaurant. We took over the restaurant's OpenTable presence and treated it like the storefront it is. And we launched organic Instagram content on a weekly cadence with HGV approval baked into the workflow. Paid social followed on Meta, structured around five lifestyle audiences with conversion and awareness campaigns running in parallel. Every week the client got a recap, a stat that mattered, and a research note from our team. Every month they got a full analytics review on the EyeSight dashboard.
That's the part most agencies skip. We didn't.
Client
Hilton Grand Vacations
Where the Reservation Happens
Most agencies stop at the click. We followed diners all the way to the table.
For a restaurant, the ad isn't the finish line. The reservation is. So Bigeye built The Social's paid program around OpenTable from day one, not as an afterthought.
We rebuilt the OpenTable listing with new hero and gallery photography from our shoot, then went after the details that decide whether a browser books: FAQs, popular dishes, and the copy diners skim before they commit. We connected the Meta pixel directly to OpenTable and verified it with live test reservations, so every campaign could be judged on bookings instead of likes. Then we monitored that connection daily for the life of the engagement. It never dropped.
The media plan itself was modeled on OpenTable data. We used reservation behavior to shape budget pacing and audience priorities, and built retargeting pools from diners who engaged but didn't book. We even pushed on the restaurant's operations, making the case to tighten available reservation times so the dining room would read as in demand rather than wide open. Busy restaurants fill faster. That's not a media tactic. It's how people choose where to eat.
Results
The numbers moved in the right direction every single week.
Click-through rate tripled. By late January, CTR across the paid campaign ran more than 3x the level from launch through mid-month, and kept climbing week over week into February with a 34% lift in a single reporting period.
Video won, decisively. "The Social Video," cut from footage we shot on site, led every creative in the account at a 4% CTR. By the end of the engagement, video creative was delivering a combined 3.6% CTR against 1% for static.
A boosting strategy that actually boosted. Shifting boosted posts from an engagement objective to an awareness objective lifted average boosted-post CTR from 0.1% to 1.1%, a tenfold improvement that turned organic content into a real acquisition lever.
Reach at scale, on a local budget. In a single December week the campaign reached roughly 253,000 people across San Antonio, with spend and traffic balanced across all five lifestyle audiences and the spa and fitness member segment leading on efficiency.
Every dollar tied to a reservation. With the Meta pixel wired into OpenTable and verified, The Social's paid social stopped being an awareness line item and became a reservations channel HGV could measure, optimize and report to the resort.
The client came back. HGV returned to Bigeye for The Grove at the Monroe in Hawaii, then asked us to build amenity photo and video production packages for food and beverage, spa and golf across its property portfolio. One restaurant launch became a corporate relationship.
What HGV said.
"We appreciate the hard work done by you and your team throughout this partnership." Lauren Jernigan, Social Media Manager, Hilton Grand Vacations
"Thank you and the team for all your hard work and responsiveness." Mike Murphy, Senior Manager, Account Management, Hilton Grand Vacations
"The resort team really appreciates the hard work on the agency's side of this project. They are really very happy to see how things are going." Éilan Hotel & Spa resort leadership, as shared by Hilton Grand Vacations
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