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Hotels – Check on The Most important step to multi fold your revenue

August 5, 2020 in Hotel Technology

Stephen, a well known photographer was planning a vacation trip to New York with his wife and 2 year old kid. He books a stay at your hotel. He is new to the city, and unclear about the facilities and surroundings. Following the confirmation of his stay he receives a pre arrival survey from you with various service options like Airport Pickup, Discount for SPA or Upgrade options. Almost after a week Stephen begins his vacation trip. Stephen arrives at the New York Airport at midnight after a long tiring journey with the 2 year old kid.

On arrival he receives a text message from you with details of Chauffeur who is waiting to pick him up from the Airport. Reaching the hotel he was directly led to the room without having to wait for the check-in process at the front office. On entering the room he found a room stocked with milk in the fridge and fruits and snacks of his preference on the counter. He also receives a digital voucher of 30% off on Spa treatment on property along with a curated list of destinations that one should not miss, visiting New York. He was delighted.

Your hotel had gone above and beyond to ensure that Stephen’s stay was as comfortable as possible, knowing that the nature of his trip was leisure and he is totally new to the city your hotel. Though these were small gestures from your part, your brand had won Stephen’s heart. How did you achieve all of this? All of this you could achieve by extracting data from the pre-stay survey which you had sent to Stephen almost a week back.

In the modern era of personalization and especially during post covid era pre stay communications as the one described above will easily win you loyal customers who will crave to come back again and again and also at the same time refer you to their other connections. Mostly we all think pre stay communication isn’t that important. We think that once guest books a stay in a property, the business is secured and the focus should be on giving a good experience on their arrival at the property. But this is not really true.

Today, guests have very limited attention span and they don’t care about you and your brand unless you treat them best from their first touch-point. As the saying goes ‘First impression is the best impression’; Pre Check-in is the key stage to set that first impression in your guest’s mind. Pre Check-in gives an opportunity to hotels to personalize guest experience by providing the guest with information relevant to their stay. With the right approach on pre stay communication hotels can personalize their guest experience, increase the revenue per customer through upsell on deals and promotions and seal business for future by gathering important guest details that will help future marketing campaigns.

Every guest books stay with you for some or the other reason. For some it might be special occasions like Birthday, Wedding Anniversary, a Business Trip or annual vacation etc. For whatever reason they have booked with you, you want to make sure that they had a great time with you. The Pre stay Communications helps to reveal the reason of their booking the stay with you.

Understanding this reason will help you to offer your services accordingly. For example, knowing someone has booked to celebrate an event like birthday means you can wish them on their arrival, even set a greetings card in their room before they arrive, offer them a complimentary Cake or dinner or a room upgrade. Unexpected gestures like these will make a huge difference to how they feel about your property. It all starts from finding out the reason why they chose to book with you.

Pre stay communication not only helps you to showcase your services, but also helps you to anticipate your guest’s needs and preferences. This will save a significant amount of time for those who face the guests at the property and also help you to up sell your services even before they check-in.

To find out more about the vast possibilities of pre stay communications and enhancing the guest experience, we invite you to explore our platform through a personalized demonstration.Book A Demo

Five Online Marketing Trends That Every Hotel Must Follow

July 30, 2020 in Digital Marketing, Hotel Technology

The growing adoption of digital marketing tools and platforms by the global hotel industry is key to attracting new customers and increasing revenues. As we approach mid-2020, every hotel business is investing in digital marketing tools and techniques to gain a competitive advantage over its competitors. Specially during this post pandemic time, you must have a sound online marketing strategy in place.

Let’s look at five marketing trends that hotels can adopt to drive the use of digital technologies in 2020.

1. Invest in digital marketing

We cannot talk about leading digital marketing trends for hotels without first establishing a strong online presence. This implies that your hotel must be both reachable and searchable through online mediums.  And the best way to do that is to use marketing tools such as email and social media marketing.  Send out emails to connect with guests as email marketing is known to be one of the best channels for communication. And it’s effective too, over 50% of users prefer to receive brand-related updates on their email address.  Besides emails, you can grow your hotel marketing through mediums like social networking platforms (to build brand connection and identity), and business SMS to boost customer communication and satisfaction.

2. Focus on local marketing

With the global lockdown on international travel, hotels need to target their marketing on local travelers or tourists in nearby regions.  For instance, you can maximize your local SEO for Google users looking for hotels in your locality because the local SEO can positively impact your hotel.  According to these 2019 SEO statistics, 72% of Google users visit a local place – within 8 kilometres of their location – after searching for them on the web.  Research for common keyword patterns (like “budget hotel in <your hotel location>) that matches your hotel – making it easier for guests to find your hotel. Start using tools like Google My Business that can help you create a free listing of your hotel and connect with local customers.

3. Engage your customers through content marketing

In this age of digital competition, content marketing is an effective way of engaging with new and existing customers.  Content marketing is a critical factor for growing your popularity online through written content, images, business videos, social media posts, or even user-generated content. User-generated content is also a great way of word-of-mouth marketing as it helps 93% of online users to make the right decision. Create travel blogs or articles on the “best places to visit” in your hotel location or the “10 most popular restaurants” at a particular travel destination that can enable consumers to engage with your hotel brand.

4. Automate your hotel marketing

Whether in the form of voice-based searches, artificial intelligence, or CRM, technology is now an integral part of hotel marketing.  According to an Oracle study, 82% of the hotels can now capture guest data at various touch points. This data can be used to derive valuable insights about the overall customer experience. Apart from using guest data, hotels can also use CRM tools for personalized marketing that can engage with each consumer based on their individual needs or interests.  Start using CRM tools such as Instio to leverage technology and provide better business engagement with customers and improve their stay experience.

5. Devise a mobile-first strategy for your hotel

Recent studies show that over 40% of online users book a hotel room on their mobile phones, while another 70% make their last-minute room bookings using their mobile phone. With Google announcing its mobile-first indexing technology, more businesses are investing in optimizing their digital presence on mobile phones.  Similarly, for the hotel industry, consumers are expecting an optimized mobile experience while interacting with hotel brands on their smartphones. Among the leading industry trends, hotels can now market their offerings to mobile phone users using in-app notifications and geo-specific digital ads.

With more players entering the global hospitality industry, existing hotels must plan and implement a digital marketing strategy that can reap good returns in the long run.Digital marketing is no longer just a buzzword, but an efficient marketing tool for hotels to grow their business over the next decade – and beyond.

Why hotels should maintain their own CRM?

July 22, 2020 in Hotel CRM, Technology

In recent decades, OTAs or Online Travel Agencies have consolidated their position in the online travel industry. OTA brands such as Expedia, Booking.com, MakeMyTrip and AirBnB have provided a regular supply of hotel room bookings to the global hospitality industry. However, on the flip side, rising OTA bookings have had an adverse impact on hotel revenues and profitability with dwindling returns on direct hotel bookings. Hotels are now paying a hefty commission of 25-30% to OTAs to retain the same customers.

The reverberations of this impact can be felt across countries. As a result, the U.S. hospitality industry’s net room revenue has reduced from 84.9% for 2015 to 83.5% in 2018. In the current scenario, OTAs have complete control over the guest data, which comprises valuable insights into where the guests are traveling from or to, their average travel budget, and their preferences.

To battle this out, hotels by far need to adapt to newer ways to eliminate the OTA’s middle-man role and reduce the dependency on third parties. Can proven tools in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) enable hotels to wrest back the advantage from OTAs? How can CRM benefit hotels? Let’s discuss that in the following section.

5 Benefits of CRM for the Hospitality Industry

Here’s how a CRM tool can benefit your hotel brand :

  1. Increase your repeat bookings: While OTA-driven bookings can influence customer satisfaction and repeat stays, direct channels offer the best opportunities for repeat bookings. A good CRM system captures the preferences, likes and dislikes of the guest and identifies why the guests are booking the property repeatedly. By identifying these factors, we can personalize their stay for the maximum guest delight. An effective CRM solution is crucial to analyze your customer actions and their future travel plans. You can deploy CRM tools to measure the increase in repeat customers, along with the generated hotel revenues for each booking. On average, hotels implementing CRM should improve their RevPAR (revenue per available room) by 2-5[3] % only from repeat bookings in the first year.
  2. Improve your guest experience: As a hotel manager, you are in the business of providing exceptional guest experience during the stay. Despite this, many hotels ignore the complete customer lifecycle – the factors behind hotel and room selection, why they are traveling (business or casual), or their travel budget. In other words, there is truly little interaction between the customer and hotel in between the stays, which makes it challenging for you to measure guest satisfaction – during their stay – except reading customer reviews on OTA portals. CRM solutions can help bridge this gap by gauging the guest experience and even identifying flaws. A good CRM system will send out surveys and collect feedback from the guest before they exit the property. This way, you are top of your guest’s expectations and you can update your offerings accordingly.
  3. Increase customer loyalty: Traditional reward-based customer loyalty programs fail in the first two years, while others generate negative sentiments on social media platforms. CRM can be used to improve these traditional loyalty programs and also replace them with a much more effective program that can boost customer loyalty. Using smartphone apps and online portals, CRM tools can capture your customers’ experience and improve their loyalty towards your brand. A good CRM system implements automated segmentation by analysing your existing customers. Also it will allow you to use these automated segments and custom segments of customer data and send targeted marketing campaigns.
  4. Create a personalized experience: Personalized marketing can build lifelong relationships between your hotel and your customers. An example of this is through personalized email marketing that caters to your customer’s specific needs and behavior. In most cases, email marketing campaigns are not as successful as they are too generic and fail to address customer needs. CRM tools can help you connect with customers on a personal level by understanding their online journey. Using CRM, you can capture valuable guest data during the stay – example, specific check-in requests, particular room preferences, preferred food or beverage, or even guest complaints – and use them in your future personalized marketing.
  5. Improve your customer support: With the rapid growth of the global travel industry, social media channels offer a plethora of the customer’s travel and hotel experience – both positive and negative. This makes proactive customer support such a necessity in the hospitality industry. CRM solutions enable you to anticipate customer problems and solve them proactively even before they happen. With easy access to guest data, your customer service agents can provide informed answers to their queries – before or after checkout. CRM tools can capture the overall customer sentiment about your brand and analyze customer requirements.

With the right CRM tool, hotel brands can collect valuable guest data and gain useful insights into their travel preferences, buying patterns, and other needs. Hotels big or small can increase direct bookings by engaging with customers using CRM data.