While the world is still battling the pandemic, the hospitality industry is facing a battle of its own. The industry is looking towards recovery and hotels are putting plans in place how to safely and gradually reopen. No one knows quite yet how the new normal for hotels will look like, but what we do know is that the experience for guests will look and feel different.
Besides adopting new health and safety procedures, hotels will also need to adapt to the new preference for touchless technology. Guests will naturally want to avoid any unnecessary contact with hotel staff and surfaces and they’ll want to control as much of their experience as possible via their personal devices.
That’s why leading hotels already provide apps that guests can use to make their stay more enjoyable, driving both revenue and increased guest satisfaction. This is especially important for allowing guests to customize their in-room experience (everything from lighting to in-room dining) based on their preferences. Now, let’s take a look at what your guests could do with an app like avery.
Schedule Housekeeping
Hotel guests can use a Web or mobile app to schedule housekeeping for the time that’s most convenient for them and avoid any interaction with the staff. This doesn’t only make the stay more comfortable for guests, but it also introduces improvements to housekeeping operations.
For the majority of hotels, housekeeping is the service that could benefit the most from optimization of the working process. When guests request room cleanup via an app, the staff immediately gets notified on their smartphones and gets to see which rooms to prioritize. This increases staff productivity while speeding up customer service.
According to an infographic by Hotel News Now, 35% of guests would prefer to use technology to schedule housekeeping services.
Order Food
Now more than ever, guests want hotel technologies that can help them instantaneously send requests for what they need. With behavior and consumption habits changing as a consequence of the pandemic, more of your guests will want to dine in and your hotel needs to provide the easiest way for them to order from the menu.
With a solution like avery, your guests can access the menu and place an order from a Web/mobile app or from their preferred messaging app, like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. They can order a meal prepared to their preference from the comfort of their bed, making the in-room dining experience seamless and convenient.
Control the in-room settings
In the new contactless reality, guests will want to personalize their in-room experience, including things like TV, room temperature, lighting, and other amenities with one centralized app on their phone. If your guests can avoid controlling all these separate devices by hand, they’ll feel safer and more in-control of their environment.
However, controlling all aspects of a room via a guest’s mobile device may seem too complex for hoteliers, mainly because there are too many individual elements that need to be connected and controllable from a single app. Thankfully, enabling connection between these disparate systems is now relatively easy with guest experience platforms, such as avery.
Make a Payment
If your guests can request services using only their personal devices, they’ll expect the same ease when it comes to payments. Naturally, cashless and contactless is the way to go.
For example, when a guest orders a meal to their room, they’ll expect an option to pay from their mobile device. With an app like avery, they can even tip the housekeeping staff or the bellman from their phone! By enabling contactless payments you’ll provide increased security and better and faster customer service.
Access Digital Compendium
Dirty, torn compendium books in hotel rooms will soon become a thing of the past. With a digital compendium available in your hotel app or guest messaging solution, you’ll keep all the information and offers up-to-date and tailored to each guest. This also makes it a whole lot easier for guests to find the information they need (e.g. the location of the pool, restaurant working hours, dry cleaning services, etc.).
With a digital compendium you can also send relevant updates to guests automatically and save a lot of time and money on updating the available information and offers.
Takeaways
When hotels start opening their doors again, they’ll need to adapt to the new reality and heightened guest expectations around health and safety. Adopting the technologies that enable contactless in-room experience will help your hotel meet a lot of those expectations, while driving revenue and streamlining operations.
