Global tourism is growing steadily while becoming more accessible to everyone. The emergence of new destinations and new experiences have contributed to attracting all sorts of travelers seeking their next best experience.
The hospitality industry is also following the trend, and has become more attractive for everyone with a proliferation of lodging options. Ranging from the corporate and traditional hospitality providers to the experience-driven options offered by local hosts, travelers are served a menu that will inevitably match their tastes.
At the same time, as companies connect and work across the globe, business travel has become more frequent and more usual – hence flooding destinations with “bleisure” travelers looking to package business and leisure in one trip.
So, how does the hospitality industry gear itself to orchestrate a memorable experience for travelers with very specific states-of-mind in the ‘always on’, fast-paced world; and what is needed digitally to make all aspects of hospitality CX user-friendly for guests?
Hospitality CX: Digital savviness should be a standard feature
Hoteliers are encouraged to keep in mind constantly changing traveler needs and how to best meet these in the age of connectivity. It’s imperative to interact with travelers across every touch point to deliver on customer expectations and ultimately drive customer retention. These are achievable ways to create enjoyable customer experiences for travelers, both traditionally and digitally.
Technology in the digital age has elevated and set standards that guests expect to receive from travel operators and hotels. This can become an impossible task when companies have siloed communication channels and various platforms with valuable guest data. To survive and thrive in the experience economy, consolidation is key.
Hospitality companies best bet to meet the standards set by guests is to leverage a holistic experience management platform that places the vast amount of guest data in one place for all employees to utilize when engaging with guests.
Leveraging a unified platform for guest data to enable data-driven decision making is great; but how do hoteliers ensure that they receive actionable insights from guests to create the personalized experiences that guests demand and to entice them to return to establishments for future travel?
Let’s take a look at the vital aspects that allow actionable insights to be extracted from guests that will put hoteliers on the right path towards experience management excellence:
Contextualize your marketing efforts and reach service excellence
- Build a single view of your customers by capturing data from your own digital channels, from 3rd party platforms as well as from your operational systems
- Build your own propensity scores, affinity rules and churn models, design more performing target groups and deploy better campaigns
- Deliver high-quality, relevant, timely interactions with travelers across all touch points by triggering actions in the system of engagement
- Respect data privacy rules and regulations to ensure trusted relationships with your guests
- Leverage intelligence beyond marketing functions and empower your guest-facing staff for enhanced service
Level up digitally
Once trust has been established, data has been collected and insights have been drawn, hoteliers are able to unify all data onto a single platform that can be utilized by all parties across the value chain and start transforming the guest buying journey.
- Go beyond the merchandizing of room inventory, include non-room inventory products and services offered by 3rd parties, and create new revenue streams
- Consistently manage offers and promotions, and use guest intelligence in a series of integrated marketing and commerce business processes to execute on a coherent direct distribution strategy
- Recognize and account for revenues faster with direct integrations between your commerce and finance systems, and understand which target groups drive the most profitability
- All along the engagement journey, provide feedback mechanisms and capture what your guests are saying and sharing about your organization
Companies in the hospitality industry want to make traveling easy and hospitality CX unforgettable for all guests in the experience economy. Intelligent solutions designed to utilize both experience data (X-data) and operational data (O-data) and transform business processes with a greater focus on experience management are the answer. The ultimate goal… to meet guests’ expectations every time and create unforgettable travel experiences!
