9 Effective Ways to Improve The Guest Experience

Guest experience is everything. It’s what ensures that your hotel will be remembered and a big part of whether a guest will return to stay with you again. You don’t need to move mountains or even free up a large budget. The good news is that there are some really effective ways to enhance the experience that your guests have with your hotel. All that needs to be done is building and making small adjustments to the offering you already have—the small and clever changes can go a long way.

Why is The Guest Experience so Important?

The experience that a guest has is massively important. It is the leading reason whether a guest will become a recurring guest or not. An experience starts from the first touchpoint a guest has with your hotel. Many think that it’s only the actual hotel visit that needs to be top-notch (which indeed it does) but so do other areas of the customer journey.

The guests’ experience can be split into three simple groups: before, during, and post-stay. Before, or pre-arrival, is everything you can do before the guest checks in. During the second group is what you can do while the guest is staying with you. Post-stay, the final group is the steps you can take once the guest has left (and how to get them to come back again).

Before: Influencing The Pre-arrival Experience

1. Pre-arrival Contact

In this modern age, guests have many ways to get in touch with your hotel. They can make inquiries through your social media pages, contact you through your website, engage with your live chat or chatbot, send you an email, or the most old-school is simply giving you a ring.

The best way to improve the first point of contact is punctuality and consistency. Each channel needs to be monitored to ensure a great guest experience. Responses should be timely, and the tone of voice should be helpful and consistent across all channels.

2. Great Website Functionality

The booking process must be straightforward to ensure a great guest experience. This means that your website should be clear, modern, fast to load, and easy to use. It should also be trouble-free when using it on a mobile. In 2021, eCommerce growth as a digital category was driven largely by mobile. In fact, eMarketer estimates that in 2021, mobile made up about 73% of all eCommerce sales.

The online booking process needs to be frictionless and pleasant for your guests—both desktop and mobile websites need to work perfectly.

3. A Personalised Online Experience

Guest experiences are grand when they’re personal. It’s a small thing that the receptionist could arrange on short notice or be accommodating to early check-in. It’s the personal touch that means the most.

Personalisation means you can tailor your website to your guest’s needs to ensure a fantastic guest experience. The great thing about the modern age is that personal touches can be added even before the guest checks in. You can now make your website as unique and customized as you like. A personalised website can represent your brand image best and allows you to gain a competitive edge over your competitors.

4. Help Your Guests Plan Their Trip

Before arrival, your guests will plan their trip and research what they can do or see in your city. Be proactive and email them local guides, blogs with hidden gems, or other sightseeing options. Sharing insider tips is an excellent start to a successful relationship with guests.

Sending them information before their arrival also equips them with helpful information about the city and includes bits on your hotel. Including your hotel’s history page is a fun way of bringing culture and flair to your offering. You can also include extra services that your hotel can help arrange. If your hotel has a spa or a gym facility, this is a great place and time to mention this.

During: Ensuring The Best Stay

5. Surprise and Delight Guests

There is nothing better than experiencing something magical that you weren’t expecting. Create a magical experience for all of your guests. It isn’t necessarily about the grand gestures here. Small gestures can mean the world to a guest having a lovely guest experience.

Look for opportunities in which you can delight your customers. This can be a spontaneous step in your hotel operation. If you have the budget for it, place small chocolate on each guest’s pillowcase. Perhaps even support a local chocolate artisan in the area for this. Leave a note beside the chocolate outlining the story of the local artisan and include an excursion to visit this local entrepreneur in the trip booklet you sent them before they checked in. This will give them the feeling of already knowing something in the city, exciting them.

Have your pastry chef write a special message on the guest’s cake if you know that someone is celebrating their birthday. Don’t allow any idea to go to waste, and no idea is too small to be special and can lead to a more memorable guest experience.

6. Focus on Customer Service & Team Training

It’s important that your entire team is well-trained to ensure a great customer experience. Each team member needs to be on the same page for there to be consistency in the guest experience.

Unfortunately, a guest experience can be tarnished within seconds. All it can take is one small slip-up or miscommunication that can leave a sour taste in a guest’s mouth. Of course, this is not always the case. Guests are forgiving and can oversee some things. The best bet is to continually train your staff and have management on the premises to step in when something goes wrong. Excellent customer service is crucial to a guest’s happy experience

7. Reward Repeat Guests

If you have guests that are loyal and have turned into brand fans, you should reward this. You can offer discount charges/rates for guests you book with you multiple times in the year. Your hotel can include additional benefits for repeat guests. These can consist of a free massage every time they book with you, early access to the gym facility, more frequent room service, or allowing them to join, with no charge, on a day trip that the hotel arranged for its guests.

They also don’t need to be grand gestures. A bunch of flowers in their room or a bottle of wine for them to enjoy on their first night with you makes a great touch.

After: Making it Memorable and Getting Returning Guests

8. Collect Reviews & be Responsive to Feedback

Implementing and incorporating clever ideas to improve your guest experience is one thing. Listening to your guests when they give you critical feedback is another. They are both equally important.

The best way to improve a guest’s experience is by knowing what to improve on. This can either be done in the form of a sheet that they fill in at the hotel, an email you send out to them once they have left or a review left on a platform like ‘Google Reviews’. Take advantage of any review or feedback left with you and see it as an opportunity to do better.

It is important to be proactive and responsive to feedback. By asking guests to leave reviews, you show them that their thoughts and opinions are important to you. By knowing what they truly think, you will be able to know exactly which areas of your offering you need to improve on. It doesn’t help if a guest points something out that they did not enjoy. They come back to visit in a few months and see that nothing has been fixed/changed.

9. Send a ‘Thank you’ Email

You can share a lovely finishing touch with your guests by sending them a ‘Thank you for staying with us’ email. There is nothing better than leaving a hotel and receiving a note saying that they enjoyed having you as a guest and that they look forward to seeing you again in the future.

It’s easy to set up, thoughtful in its approach, uncomplicated in the setup, and will reap many benefits. This email can also include upcoming specials that you will offer and allow the guest to picture their next trip with your hotel. It plants a lovely seed in their mind to book with you again next time.

All in all, creating a special guest experience is what it is all about. The way you go about doing that will depend on your team size, budget, flexibility, and offers. We encourage taking the time to brainstorm some ideas with your team and would be overjoyed if you used some of ours to improve your guests’ experience.