Our guests don’t experience our hotels in departmental slices. They experience a continuous journey, a narrative that begins long before they step foot in the lobby and extends well after they’ve checked out.
NB: This is an article from Demand Calendar
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It’s time we tore down the internal walls and rebuilt our operations around this fundamental truth.
The New Imperative: Orchestrating the Guest Journey
Today’s traveler craves seamless, personalized, and memorable experiences. They don’t care about our internal departmental structures. They care about their journey. To meet and exceed their expectations, we must reorient our entire hotel operation around the core guest journey, which can be understood in five key stages:
1. ATTRACT: Becoming the Desired Destination
- What it means: This is about more than just general advertising. It’s about deeply understanding your ideal guest profile and crafting a compelling brand story, image, and online presence that resonates specifically with them. It’s ensuring your hotel stands out to the right audience, making them want to choose you over any other.
- Silo trap: Marketing runs campaigns, but are they aligned with the actual on-site experience or the capacity of the sales team to convert specific types of leads?
- Journey focus: Marketing, Sales, and even Revenue Management collaborate to define target personas, craft aligned messaging, and ensure the value proposition is clear and consistently communicated across all touchpoints.
2. CAPTURE: Sealing the Deal, Seamlessly
- What it means: Once a potential guest is interested, the booking process must be intuitive, easy, and reassuring. This includes your website’s usability, the clarity of your offerings, the efficiency of your reservation system, and the responsiveness of your direct booking channels.
- Silo trap: Reservations focuses solely on filling rooms based on availability, perhaps without full insight into marketing promotions or the specific needs of guests attracted by certain campaigns.
- Journey focus: Reservations, IT, and Marketing work together to ensure a frictionless booking experience, from initial inquiry to confirmation, making it easy for guests to commit.
3. PREPARE: Setting the Stage for an Effortless Stay
- What it means: The period between booking and arrival is a golden opportunity to enhance the upcoming stay and build anticipation. This involves proactive communication, offering personalized upsells and cross-sells (think spa treatments, restaurant reservations, room upgrades, local experiences), and gathering information to tailor the stay. It’s about making the guest feel valued and prepared.
- Silo trap: The Concierge, F&B, and Spa only engage if the guest actively reaches out. Upselling might be an afterthought or aggressively pushed at check-in.
- Journey focus: A dedicated pre-arrival team (or cross-functional effort from Reservations, Marketing, Concierge, and F&B) curates pre-stay communications, offers relevant services, and ensures guest preferences are noted and disseminated to relevant departments before arrival.
Niki Van den Broeck – Manager of Busi...
