What guests expect of their hotel stay is a moving target.

It has varied from era to era and will continue to do so. It varies from person to person, too. Delivering the best possible experience is, therefore, about adapting to changing times and shifting sensibilities. It’s about evolution. With that understood, it’s important to remember that the features and functionality of any given hospitality software solution or platform are always just means to an end.

Whatever a hotel group has in place; it must enable movement away from old paradigms toward the newest ones. Today that means generic transactions between guests and single hotel locations must be exchanged for something that’s far more vital; fostering and building life-long relationships.

What elements must hoteliers consider when initiating that movement?

The first step is acknowledging that things have changed and that a new approach must be considered.

Changing times, changing approaches.

The hospitality industry landscape has been challenging since the beginning of the decade. This period of disruption has emphasized a movement toward more relationship-oriented approaches with guests. That, in turn, has highlighted a renewed focus on personalization and a dedication to understanding their diverse needs. Recent times have helped to underscore the idea that every guest from any given region is different, with a range of comfort levels, sensibilities around safety, and other personal requirements by which they’re likely to judge their own experiences. Their reasons for travel or any engagement with hotel properties are similarly diverse – pleasure, business, a combination of both, kids, no kids, and the list goes on.

To deliver a great guest experience then, an ongoing relationship between consumer and brand based on real data that is centrally accessible must be established on that personal and granular level. Knowing who guests are and what they’re looking for from one stay to another is paramount to building a vital sense of momentum to increase lifetime value. For hotel groups, this calls for a greater degree of operational flexibility and shared business intelligence between properties to build useful profiles. It also has implications on how consumers engage with hotel brands in the first place, with the concept of a personalized experience starting at the earliest possible stage in the process. The vehicle for this is in the palm of every guest’s hand.

The vital importance of mobile.

At this point in history, the average person is connected to information at the highest possible level through the internet and specialized applications via their own hand-held devices. That means that they can access what they want from anywhere at any time if they have an internet connection. They can curate their own interests and experiences across all kinds of activities that are personalized for them according to their histories and preferences. This is true whether they’re ordering groceries, reading the news, downloading a novel to read on the plane, posting an online review, or buying a gift for someone and sending it to them with a touch of a keypad. Mobile technology eliminates the “one-size-fits-all” model of a consumer experience. Hotel technology must support this very same journey.

When it comes to initiating a stay at a hotel location, managing a booking while at home or en route has been more important to the consumer experience than ever before. Social distancing has been a key driver to this in the last while. But the real need being met by this self-directed emphasis enabled by mobile is all about who is in control of the process and what the nature of that interaction will be. When a guest feels like they can navigate the process and customize it at will, that is the best start to a great guest experience all around. For the hotelier’s part, this is about creating an environment where guests always feel like the prime movers of their own experiences. This acknowledges the agency of every guest. It supports their individuality, preferred pace, and levels of comfort. As mentioned, they conduct most of their activities in this way. Why should their hotel stay be any different?

A question of empowerment.

With the power of mobile technology and the consumer culture expectation that processes should always be at their fingertips, the guest becomes the decider of the where and when. Options for remote check-ins and check-outs support this. It means guests can see what the options are for upgrades and added services or specialized offers based on earlier interactions. It means managing their experiences at any point during their stay, with face-to-face interaction being optional as appropriate. In this way, their activities become fluid and not reliant on a fixed point in space like the front desk or concierge – although interactions there can still happen at these locations at the guest’s discretion.

The main principle at work here is this: the guest wants to be treated as an individual. They don’t want to be just another transaction between them and the hotel location. They want to retain control of their experiences, not relinquish them to a static process. The technology in place should be geared to empowering guest control at every stage for this reason. When a guest feels in control as they are used to being in other areas of their lives, this adds to a central mission that is one of the essential constants in the hospitality industry: comfort. When it comes to investing in new technology, guest empowerment like this must be at the top of the list, with mobile capabilities, contactless processes, and customization options all the way along.

Staying connected - CRM and Cloud PMS

Ensuring continuity is another key principle of building a relationship with guests, rather than simply amassing transactions. Continuity means acknowledging the things that make guests who they are as people – their histories, their preferences, their motivations that brought them to a hotel property, to begin with. An essential factor in this is to ensure that when guests stay at a single hotel location, they’re connected to the whole hotel group and to the values the organizations represent. This means each individual hotel can recognize return guests even on the first visit to a new location and anticipate what they want based on previously established preferences.

With this, a single technology platform that connects all locations into a common environment is becoming more and more essential to being able to build relationships with guests to increase guest loyalty and lifetime value. Cloud technology is becoming the preferred platform to enable this, with each location’s property management solution (PMS) with a robust CRM that allows hotel groups to draw from a single guest profile across an entire brand in the most accessible way possible. An “above premise” model like this unifies locations by connecting them to a common set of data in an easily accessible real-time capacity – often via the hoteliers’ own mobile devices wherever they are and at whatever time of day or night.

Building momentum with guests.

Hotel technology should support a sense of connectedness between guests and brands and lend a greater degree of flexibility and control to guests. The reason for this is simple – that’s the way that consumer culture is headed on a global scale. The trend toward personalization and guest-curated experiences had been making steady progress for years. Since early 2020, world events have only accelerated it. Technology in support of that to bring strategic clarity and operational unity are worthy priorities. Unifying a hotel group’s properties in the cloud means that the guest interacts with the whole brand, not just a single location. In this way, the idea of disconnected experiences and crude transactional models become something far more powerful.

With personalization as a guiding principle and mobile technology being the prime vehicle to empower guests, the approach to how a hotel group serves guests shifts from single stays and disconnected transactions to detailed guest profiles via integrated CRM across all locations geared toward the long game. This functionality helps hoteliers to more efficiently foster relationships with guests no matter which location they stay in. This is a powerful prospect on an operational level.

But it’s more than that, too. It encourages a lifelong journey together.


About the Author

Michael Schubach, Vice President Product Management and Chief of Staff & Industry Strategy, Hospitality at Infor

Michael Schubach from Infor

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Michael Schubach, CHTP+, CHAE+, has more than four decades of Hospitality industry experience and is currently Vice President and Chief of Staff & Industry Strategy for Infor Hospitality. Previously, Michael was an industry writer and consultant working with many different organizations to develop strategies and content across the industry – from vendors to small and large hotel properties in North America, Asia, Africa, and Europe.

He has held various senior management and C-level positions at companies such as Agilysys, Trump Hotel Collection, Pinehurst Resort, Computerized Lodging Systems and Rosen Hotels & Resorts. Throughout his career, he has supervised system installations at more than 2,500 hotel locations worldwide. In 2015, Michael became the 38th inductee to the HFTP International Hall of Fame.

Connect with Michael on Linkedin.

Infor is a Founding Member at techtalk.travel.


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