Travelers looking to book their holidays spend countless hours researching locations, transportation methods, itineraries, and accommodation options. Especially when booking a hotel, they’re faced with a large variety of choices—and they will choose the one they resonate with best.
You need to differentiate yourself from the crowd and ensure you are the top choice for your target audience. And for them to choose you, you need to show them that you can cater to their needs while researching—you need to catch their attention online.
In this article, you’ll learn why you should provide a personalized digital guest experience and what are some easy ways for you to get started straight away.
Why Should you Provide a Personalized Digital Guest Experience?
Offering a personalized guest experience in the digital world benefits hotels and guests. Today’s travelers expect a personalized experience, and hotels that fail to provide it may lose out on potential guests. Personalizing the online experience is essential to meeting guests’ expectations and providing them with the desired service.
With a personalized digital experience, guests receive quick and easy relevant information for their interests and needs. As a result, you can start your relationship on the right foot. With this initial boost of satisfaction, guests are more likely to return to your hotel in the future. On top of that, they’re also likely to spend more.
Hotels can upsell additional amenities and services by providing guests with tailored offers and promotions, leading to increased revenue.
Getting Started: Use Data to Know Your Guests
It is easy to gather the first set of information about your guests. Whenever someone makes a booking, information such as stay dates and party size will appear in your PMS. You may want to check out information like check-in and check-out times, room preferences, and spending habits to create offers that suit your target audience’s needs and habits.
However, you need to dig deeper than that. Consider gathering data from multiple sources, like your social media platforms. Look into your analytics and see who interacts with you by liking your posts, commenting, or even following you. Another great use of analytics is looking at the type of traffic coming through to your website.
Don’t be scared to send out a survey—online, by email, or in person. Pay attention to the feedback you get. This can include questions about guests’ demographics, satisfaction levels, travel patterns, and preferences for amenities and services.
What did your guests like during their stay? What did they dislike? How could you have made their stay better? Take note of every bit of information you can get and try to find patterns across target groups. From then on, tailor your online presence keeping your target guest in mind.
How to Personalize the Digital Guest Experience
Below you’ll find tips to personalize the digital experience of your guest.
1. Use Social Media to Your Advantage
Social media is a great tool to engage with people and listen to their wants and needs. First, you must ensure you know where your guests are online. Do they spend most of their time on Facebook groups, browsing inspiration on Pinterest, or scrolling through Instagram? Check which platforms bring the most traffic to your website, and then ensure you post relevant content on that platform.
Use the data you have collected about them to post about things they might be interested in or find value in. Follow their reactions and adapt your social media and content strategy accordingly.
2. Stay in Touch Via Email
Setting up an email marketing strategy is easy to stay in touch with your guests while ensuring a personalized experience. Don’t only stick to sending out emails for booking confirmation. Consider also sending out emails before and after their arrival at your property.
Pre-arrival is the best time to discover your guests’ preferences. Ask them about their dietary needs, transportation, and reasons for travel. Depending on your amenities, you can also suggest upsells, which could bring you additional revenue while improving your guests’ stay. You can also use pre-arrival emails to suggest points of interest in your area. Try giving your guests valuable tips and guides that will ease their planning. If you’re partnered with any local businesses, this is a great time to put that partnership to good use.
After the guests’ stay, working on your relationship and developing customer loyalty is great. Thank them for their stay, seek feedback, and see how you can improve. Use this feedback to enrich your existing data, so you can better appeal to your audience in the future. You can even consider giving guests a discount for their future stay as a “Thank you” for taking the time to provide feedback.
3. Create Offers Tailored to Your Audience
The world is your oyster! There is a lot of information that you can use to create personalized offers for the guests on your website. For starters, you can have targeted welcome messages based on where the traffic to your website is coming from. For example, if the traffic comes from Instagram, you can create an offer like “Welcome to the most Instagrammable spot in the Alps”. If traffic comes from Google Maps, you can experiment with offers that bundle a stay at your hotel with a complimentary guided tour of your surrounding areas.
There are also some things you may be able to do based on your guests’ cookie settings. If they have booked with you before, you can create a welcome message addressing them by name. And if they fit into a certain geographical region you are targeting, for example, an area no more than 200km away, consider creating offers for last-minute weekend trips.
You can also create targeted offers in the booking engine. These are great because you already know information like the type of room guests are looking for and their party size. You can also target them based on the days they are staying. For example, if the booking is for two people, over the weekend, in your “Romantic Suite”, it’s safe to assume that the guests are a couple that wouldn’t mind a complimentary glass of champagne with their dinner. You can display a message in the booking engine to convey this offer and even offer to upgrade their room at a discounted rate.
4. Show Relatable Information and Testimonials
Social proof is very effective in increasing conversion rates. This is because displaying testimonials makes you look more transparent and honest. As guests trust other guests, displaying testimonials will make you seem more trustworthy. On top of that, social proof can also be great for personalizing the digital guest experience.
Guests are more likely to trust those that are similar to them. That is why it’s a great idea to display reviews in the booking engine when you already know some details about the guests. Are they booking for two kids and two adults? Then you can show them reviews from families that have stayed with you. They will find that relatable and will be more likely to book.
Similarly, if you know your guests are coming with their pets, tell them about the delicious treats you have for four-legged visitors in your cafeteria. Guests will appreciate it—and their pets too.
5. Consider AI-Powered Self-Service Solutions
Your guests need to feel taken care of. A question submission form won’t do for guests looking for answers to their questions quickly. Make sure you have a thorough FAQ section. Like this, most questions that can show up will be answered.
However, there will always be particular questions that the FAQ might not cover. For this, consider taking advantage of AI technology and chatbots. This technology is becoming increasingly advanced and could help guests plan their itineraries. And on top of that, not only will this technology help you create a more personalized digital experience for your guests, but it will also ease the workload of your staff and can help you collect real-time feedback.
Lastly, ensure a quick way for guests to contact you directly. Create a Whatsapp business account and ensure someone is constantly monitoring it.
6. Allow Guests to Personalise Their Stay Online Easily
One last step you can take to ensure your guests have a personalized digital experience is to let them personalize their stay online. Whether through your chatbot, on Whatsapp, during booking, or through a form, let guests know they can personalize their stay. Think early check-in, late check-out, dietary preferences, and even pre-ordering meal service to the room for when they arrive. This is an easy way to generate additional revenue and makes guests feel they have complete control over their experience.
You’re Ready to Offer a Personalized Digital Guest experience!
Guests are looking for personalized stays. But they’re also used to having all the information they want at their fingertips at all times. This is why you must ensure that you can provide a personalized digital guest experience and only personalize their experience at your property. Using these tips, you can make guests feel welcome even before they arrive at your property. Win-win! And along with that, you will also increase conversion and drive additional revenue.
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