In 2022, the hospitality industry underwent significant changes as it adapted to meet the evolving needs of guests. Hotels and other hospitality businesses have had to find new ways to connect with and engage their customers. At the same time, advancements in digital solutions were and continue to be crucial in helping hotels to meet their guests wherever they are, improve the overall guest experience, and stay competitive in a fast-changing market.
As a hotel technology provider, LasoExperience is proud to have been at the forefront of these developments, working with our customers to deliver innovative solutions that drive customer success and maximize ancillary revenue for hotels. From personalized automated messaging and in-context offers to feedback management and data analytics, the Laso Experience platform has empowered hotels to build stronger, more meaningful relationships with their guests.
2022 was also a year of delivering new installs and at a record pace, some of the customers include Pebblebrook, Pyramid Benchmark, Viceroy, Spruce Point Inn, and the Sunseeker Resort. Let’s take a quick look at why our customers chose the LasoExperience platform, what positive impact we made to their business, and how we plan to continuously improve LasoXP to benefit both hotels and their guests.
Enabling business outcomes vs. adding new functionality
In 2022, our team has been busy growing the LasoExperience platform so that each new functionality we add helps hoteliers achieve a specific business outcome.
Guest Satisfaction
For example, one common problem is that hotels typically don’t catch and address bad feedback in time. Most of the negative guest feedback can be resolved towards ultimate guest satisfaction by asking the guest early enough about their experience.
LasoExperience provides a simple conversational “Hey, anything bothering you?” notification during the stay to capture timely complaints and resolve them. This is all part of the guest engagement platform and accumulated in one actionable place in the dashboard.
The result? Our customers reported improved ratings and more qualitative feedback from their guests on average by 0.1 points (after just 6 months of running on our system). All of this steered from our post-stay review engagement notification.
Booking experiences
The app serves as a daily inspiration for guests on what to do during their stay, providing timely personalized recommendations around experiences and offers. LasoXP is an automated system that learns about the guest preferences as they use the system. It combines smart notifications and daily offers to help the guests book items they like.
The system provides a rounded benefit of capturing guest attention throughout their stay with automated messages, from pre-stay touch points (check-in notifications, room upgrade offers) to in-stay communication (in-house or local events notifications, specials, personalized activities, etc.) and post-stay feedback.
For our customers, all of this engagement led to more experiences booking by guests, from spa to boats, sailing, wine tasting and other experiences offered by the properties. The highest level of guest engagement was achieved from SMS promos and upcoming events push notifications.
For our customers, incremental revenues from Room Upgrades and Early Check Ins averaged around $1500 per month. The average hotel size in our system is 160 rooms. All of this was achieved while the world went through some of the very low occupancy months in 2022. We’re looking forward to 2023 when we’ll expand to more resorts with 800+ rooms.
Know your guest
We also tackled another major pain for hoteliers – inability to capture guest contact early. This happens because OTAs record guests’ contact information and often don’t share it with hotels.
To help hotels take back the control over this important guest touchpoint we’ve enabled them to embed a link to the LasoExperience web application into the booking confirmation so that guests can enter their contact (email, phone number) and continue to explore relevant offers and activities that can enrich their stay.
From this point on the LasoXP automation engine takes over and engages the guests before and during their stays by providing timed and personalized offers and experiences to book.
AI Concierge
With the LasoExperience platform, guest messaging is powered by our AI conversational agent (concierge) that learns on top of the entered activity data and is expandable to address common guest inquiries automatically as well as to ping needed staff to react to specific guest needs (e.g. housekeeping, or more info).
In front of the guest whenever needed
Working with our customers we’ve learned that hotels are more willing to invest in technologies that are easily scalable and provide seamless integration with their current tech stack. In 2022 one of our goals was to enable easy integrations with the existing systems that hotels are already using to run their business, such as the PMS, door locks, and service ticket automation software.
By exchanging guest data with the property management systems our platform provides a single, unified view of the guest experience. This allows hotels to better understand their guests' needs and preferences, and to deliver personalized, relevant experiences that drive loyalty and retention.
We also wanted to empower housekeeping and maintenance staff to do more impactful work, while at the same time enabling guests to conveniently request any service from the hotel’s Web/mobile app or via simple text message. Through integrations with the Amadeus HotSOS platform and hotel operations software Alice, we’re making high-impact task automation possible for faster resolution time and a better guest experience.
In 2022 we also integrated with SALTO and Assa Abloy to enable guests to get room keys delivered to their mobile devices during check-in which provides a way for a guest to head directly to their room and avoid any wait time at the front desk. From the convenience of their phone they can share the key with accompanying guests as well.
Integrated mobile key experience helps the mission of making guests happy and making every guest feel like a VIP by tailoring services to their needs, showing relevant offers, and creating overall memorable experiences through technology they’ll love to use.
Takeaways
LasoExperience has one core mission – to improve guest experience throughout their stay. Our goal for 2023 is to help more hotels leverage the interaction channels (web/mobile/AI messaging) available in our platform to help guests discover relevant experiences and offers, while at the same time increasing their ancillary revenues.
