The world of holiday booking has evolved. Customers are more wary with their arrangements, especially as holiday uncertainty is still high.
NB: This is an article from Avvio
This means they are likely to do lots of research and not book on the first visit to your website. A great way to combat this, and importantly – secure bookings, is by creating a personalised experience for your customer that remembers and adapts to what they are searching for, using their data to provide a more intuitive booking process.
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter and stay up to date
But not only this, data is now a huge part of our lives; from watching TV on Netflix to listening to music on Spotify, our everyday interactions through these platforms are captured and the knowledge used to (hopefully) provide us with a better experience.
A hotel experience is no different. By using the guest data available to you, and creating a more personalised journey for these guests, you have the opportunity to provide great customer service and improve the overall impression of your hotel for new and potential customers. It’s the online experience that can make a huge difference to your guest’s stay, not just the time spent at your hotel.
What does this mean for your hotel? We’re not suggesting you need to drop everything and focus solely on your website, oh no. Of course, the true hotel experience starts and ends in your four walls and the very nature of the hospitality industry has been to provide the best stay possible. However, it is essential that your hotel’s website provides:
- Simple and clear navigation
- Images that reflects and sells your property
- A user experience that is intuitive and exciting
- Targeted digital marketing to drive traffic and create revenue
Think of it this way; you need to create a stunning website that your users love to visit and book through, and power it with data-driven analytics that learns from their interactions and uses this information to provide an even better experience. Beauty meets brains…
Here are some important things to take into account when creating a personalised experience from a data-centric point of view:
Focus on the guest’s digital experience as well as the guest themselves
Research shows us that a returning website visitor is 3 x more likely to make a booking than a first time visitor. Our booking engines know what stage of the journey your website visitors are on – ranging from first time visitor to confirmed booking and post-stay and can help them navigate through the site accordingly.
Create personalised packages
As we mentioned before, customers don’t always book on the first visit to your website. So it’s important to have a system that can remember what they were searching for and allow them to pick them right back up where they left off. These repeat visits are a great opportunity to offer additional packages that are relevant to their interests to help them decide that your hotel is the place to visit.
You can even create special messaging with systems like allora.ai to make the customer feel like an individual with dedicated customer service, and not just another booking.
Work smarter, not harder…
Employing ‘Smart Content’, which focuses on harnessing a guest’s location, interests, date ranges etc will allow you to create and suggest a guest offering which is far more aligned to the guest’s own preferences – all because you’ve gathered this data through your website.
The last word…
Personalisation and the use of guest data has become an expectation, and with the simple steps listed above you can provide the excellent customer service that we know you can give. A simple, relevant, and personalised message can be the difference someone needs to make a booking.
