Do you want your hotel guest experience to be top-notch? By increasing guest experience, want bookings to boost? Do you wonder how to do that?
NB: This is an article from AxisRooms
While a pleased guest may have been delighted with their stay at your hotel, this does not guarantee that they would return. If people don’t connect with your brand, they may be influenced by price, location, or amenities the next time they book a stay.
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Here comes the role of creating a meaningful experience that will linger and ultimately be shared; you must emotionally connect with tourists.
Tell Your Story
Humans are born with a need to tell stories. We’ve told stories over the campfire for thousands of years, and our passion for stories continues now. We read books, go to the movies, binge-watch Netflix, and post photos of our travels on social media. Stories give meaning to our lives and assist us in understanding the world.
Hoteliers are well aware of this fact; therefore, hotels employ storytelling to engage with their customers nowadays. They spend more time appealing to emotions than reasoning to reach the brain’s more primitive portions.
Stories reveal your brand’s heart and soul beyond products and services. They encourage customers to learn more about you, such as your hotel’s culture or origin story. So it’s important to take time to find the way your users feel about your hotel.
Get Emotional
Research says, “decisions are usually taken when emotions overpower reasonable brain processes.” Also, strong emotional stimulation is key to success.
For hoteliers, this involves maximizing the emotional value your hotel provides. It must help tourists to relax and enjoy themselves. It must help them bond with their partner or family and thus guarantee long-lasting memories and improve the hotel guest experience.
Create Urgency
OTAs are experts at generating a sense of urgency in their customers, causing them to reach for their bank cards. Limitations, such as the thought of a short time to take advantage of a good offer or a fixed number of rooms available, are powerful motivators for customers.
Another strategy is to create a language that promotes urgency. For example, discounted price only for the next 3 hours, would be great to create urgency.
You can also employ an extremely effective countdown that alerts visitors that they are getting closer to missing out on a great deal with each passing second.
Keep Things Simple
People are conditioned to make the easiest decisions. Keeping things simple is a vital aspect of any online purchase.
By simply defaulting to the most common options in the hotel booking process, you’ll be eliminating the paradox of choice for the hoteliers, and hence save time while making it easier to finish the booking process. Hence it will exceed guest expectations in the hotel.
Keep Track of Your Visitors’ Tastes
Any of a guest’s tastes or opinions should be recorded in the booking system so that they may be remembered the next time they book. This is essential if they have shown dissatisfaction with something or have strongly preferred anything.
Keep a checklist of the reason for their visit — a family wedding or a winter vacation so that you can remind them whenever they visit your website again.
Use Fear Of Missing Out
FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is a big challenge, rising faster than ever. We all suffer from FOMO in some form or another. Hoteliers have a unique opportunity to take advantage of this attitude and convince people to book.
These include displaying how many people have recently booked a stay, such as six guests have booked a room in the last 12 hours, or displaying how many deluxe and luxury rooms are still available in inventory, like only three more Queen Suites are available.
This reveals that other tourists have chosen to stay at your hotel, and they will book a room out of FOMO. Here you can see hotel websites tap into guests’ emotions.
Reduce Buyer’s Guilt
As every hotelier knows, a fully booked room isn’t a reason for celebration just yet. This is because guests can cancel due to a change of plans or, worse, pangs of guilt. We all feel it, don’t we?
Travelers need post-booking comfort even after spending hours researching hotel stays, reading reviews, and finally reserving a stay. Assist them in making their purchase decision. This will no doubt increase hotel guest experience and emotional bond with customers.
So, after a room has been reserved, greet the guest and reassure them of their decision to stay with you. You may execute this by reminding your booked guests about what makes your hotel and place worth a visit in their reservation confirmation and pre-stay communications.
Another brilliant trick to reassure their decision to stick with you is to encourage them to share the news on social media.
When customers reveal where they’re planning to stay for their future holiday, they’re less likely to change their minds and cancel, and they’re also more likely to become unintentional enthusiasts of your hotel.
Provide Customers Value Upfront
According to research, website visitors are more likely to do you a favour if you do something for the first. This is known in marketing as reciprocity or the give-and-take principle. Tourists will have a natural urge and need to return the favour if you provide something of value upfront.
Major travel companies have previously used the reciprocity strategy to increase their reach and revenues.
In return for a guest’s email address, most hotels guarantee exclusive ‘secret deals and offers’ that will never be broadcast on their website to everyone.
When users join up for TripAdvisor’s email newsletter, they offer additional, smart travel suggestions. Later, they may use these email lists to promote to them regularly, driving that one-time visitor closer to making a reservation.
Include reciprocity on your hotel’s website to enhance the hotel experience by providing:
- Suggestions from the experts on how to get the most out of your trip. This indicates that you are interested in giving an authentic, local experience rather than simply marketing the same old tourist attractions as every other hotel.
- They will receive a free or discounted benefit on their first reservation, such as free parking, a complimentary appetizer, or a spa coupon.
- Only those who provide their email address will receive special deals.
Speak Their Language
Are your visitors primarily families trying to create lasting experiences throughout their vacation? Then avoid using fashionable lingo. Create your copy keeping family values in mind.
Is it possible to market to millennials? Avoid using dull and uninteresting words. Identify who your target audience is, how they communicate, and how they work to become ‘one of them.’ By identifying, you can smoothly provide them with a hotel guest experience.
Use Humor
Humor has a powerful pull on people. Use it on your website to exceed guest expectations in hotels. The blog is one of the best places to showcase a hotel’s true character. Here you can add humor so that travel enthusiasts find it interesting. With this, you can tap into guests’ emotions.
Use Emotions To Boost Your Direct Bookings
For years, managers have used emotions to influence customer decision-making. Your hotel may win over the minds and hearts of your tourists and push them one step closer to a reservation by applying the above 10 ideas to your website.
With AxisRooms’ booking engine software, you can easily manage your bookings through your own hotel’s website. Partner with AxisRooms today to get all their benefits.
