The opportunities for hotels to reimagine how they operate and measure success are vast, but the challenges can’t be underestimated. They will require a whole-of-organization approach to transforming the hotel business – from the systems and how they glean their data and insights, to how they market themselves and meet changing guest expectations.
Indeed, hotels facing the reality of running multiple systems across bookings, guest experiences and business processes that are not interconnected will struggle. Siloed data, conflicting data sets and lack of actionable insights can see them lose valuable competitive advantage. Manual, repetitive tasks are inefficient and can waste fixed time and resources.
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Contrast this with the benefits of overhauling many of these processes that can transform operations, from reimagining housekeeping, front office and F&B services to generating actionable guest intelligence, valuable predictions and insights that tell you the true value of a recent marketing promotion.
While every business has customers, what is unique about the hotel business is that it welcomes guests who stay in their surrounds, and invest some of their most personal and important parts of their life to the venue. This starts long before the event, from choosing and booking accommodation, and extends all the way to the post-stay experience and even the memories people hold.
Choosing the right technology is an opportunity for hotels to be closer to their guests, and to focus on creating those memorable experiences. The right technology functions as the vital backbone supporting the operations of the hotel geared toward knowing and servicing guests as the number one priority.
Becoming a Savvy Hotel Marketer
As the number of travelers grew over recent decades, it was easy for hotels to ride this growing wave of demand. By contrast, hotels today are faced with fewer guests and new ones they may not have thought to target before, who are their untapped potential customers.
To capture these guests, hotels will benefit from being digitally savvy and putting their brand where the customers are. It comes as no surprise that the number of digital consumers has grown and shopping online has become ingrained in daily life during Covid lockdowns. What this means is that hotels of every description need an optimized digital platform that hooks guests from the first touch.
Marketing budgets may have been cut in the aftermath of the crisis, but that mustn’t hinder hotels from exploring cost-effective or otherwise free strategies of reaching their guests, such as social media. Taking a short-term approach can have long-term consequences for hotels that have gone dark when others have stayed visible during this time.
No business can survive, and thrive, in this era of digital commerce without guest data intelligence across the entire customer experience.
Reassessing Every Aspect of the Guest Experience
The heightened awareness of health and wellbeing among consumers presents hotels with an opportunity to develop and market guest services and differentiate themselves. Hotels may want to develop a package of services under one roof where guests can remain in a declared Covid-safe environment, for example. Minimizing physical touchpoints using technology, from payments to digital keys and in-room voice-activated digital assistants, can be a key selling point.
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