Most hospitality companies know their guests extremely well: who they are, what they like, where they go, and what they want to do with their free time. When hotels successfully use this understanding to cater to travelers’ unique needs and preferences, their guests feel valued and appreciated.
In the past, this knowledge was gathered and actioned through individual at-stay service from the front desk and concierge. Now, hotels are expected to meet consumers’ need for uniqueness much earlier in their journey. This is difficult - thanks to legacy technology, fragmented data, and complex operations.
In this article, we discuss how hotels can overcome these roadblocks, to put themselves back in the lead when it comes to delivering - and reaping the rewards of - personalized guest service.
Personalization in hotel marketing asks a lot from your data, content, and tech stack. The payoff, however, is an opportunity to stand out in today’s crowded marketplace.
Typically, we see that hotels' personalization isn’t done well for two reasons:
1. It’s hard to organize the data in all one place, to truly get to know your guests
2. It’s hard to translate that data into an offer that really feels personalized
Let’s look at each in turn, and share how your hotel can avoid the most common mistakes to offer industry-leading service.
Typically a hotel collects a lot of data on its guests... but that data isn’t well organized. Details about their booking journey - how they heard about you, how they booked, etc. - are all stored in one system. Details on what they’ve done during their stay - ordering room service, going to the gym, etc - are all in another system (or systems!). Details on how they reviewed the hotel (including any subsequent stays) are somewhere else again...
What hotels need is a single source of truth for understanding their guests, and have that information be actionable in many different ways. That’s why we’ve built Turneo experiences platform to be API-first. It's easy to feed in guest details from your other systems, and you always get insights from us in a readily accessible format.
But that brings us on to the next common mistake...
Once you have a single source of truth for your guests, the next step is to work out how you use that information to provide something meaningful. In order to truly add value for your guests, you need to offer them communications and services tailored to their preferences and needs. The easiest way to do that? Through a diverse selection of activities and experiences: from spa treatments, to dining options, to private tour guides. But these offers need to centrally coordinated and controlled to avoid spamming guests multiple times, or creating a disjointed journey. At Turneo, we provide a platform that can cater to any activity a guest might be doing with you, regardless of how it is organized (or by whom). It is so much easier to control and adjust your offer if you have just one home for everything.
Personalization has been shown to increase guests' loyalty, boost their spend, and drive repeat business. By making people feel special, and simplifying their decision-making, personalization programs can deliver an 8x return on investment (ROI) and increase sales by at least 10 percent.
Hotels can no longer put off bringing their personalization expertise online. But the good news is - it doesn't need to be as hard as they think!
In less than a week you could be selling and managing all your experiences online.
