Guest experience is a critical piece of the hotel revenue puzzle which is why many hoteliers are now looking for effective ways to integrate guest satisfaction into their revenue strategies. The math here looks quite simple – happy guests equals more revenue.
The difficult part is managing the economics of guest experience and setting up proper processes, technologies and workflows to build successful guest experience initiatives.
Hotels, like other hospitality businesses, are used to measuring the impact of their guest experience strategy by looking at ratings in online review sites or post-stay surveys. Reviews are undoubtedly important, when positive they can drive new bookings while negative reviews can damage your reputation. However, due to the current economic climate, there was never a better time to think beyond reviews and tie guest experience to your property’s ability to drive incremental revenue.
Let’s take a look at how you can fine-tune your guest experience strategy so that it makes a measurable positive impact on your hotel revenue.
Delight your guests at every touchpoint
This one is hard because it depends so much on people and processes and how your property communicates with guests and delivers services that you so thoughtfully designed for them.
Relationships still rule the world of hospitality but the high-touch service that attends to guest’s every need is difficult to scale and staffing shortages are just one of the issues preventing hotels from repeatedly delivering excellence.
This is where technology comes in as a way to facilitate frictionless guest experiences and smooth communication on guests’ own terms. The right hospitality tech helps free up staff to provide better service but it also gives guests the option to take control of their own experience.
There are numerous direct guest touch points from booking to post-stay that you can power with guest experience technology to increase their satisfaction. Here are some examples:
- Handle early guest requests instantly with automated messaging. Provide great support, don’t miss early up-sell opportunities.
- Enable fast and frictionless check-in, eliminate front desk queuing, enable guests to go straight to their room with a mobile key.
- Allow guests to personalize their stay with services, amenities, and activities they can discover and book through your branded hotel web/mobile app.
- Deliver service excellence and answer to guest requests via SMS, instant messaging, or in-app chat to speed up time-to-resolution and boost guest satisfaction.
Guest experience platforms like LasoExperience are designed to help you both personalize the guests’ stay and drive ancillary revenue opportunities at every touch point, while taking into account guests’ needs and preferences.
The link between guest communication and revenue
Smooth guest communication and support are important drivers of guest satisfaction, guaranteeing better reviews and more sales. With new generations of guests come new communication channels that hotels need to explore.
Are you engaging with guests on channels of their choice? SMS, instant messaging, in app, you’ll definitely need some form of automation to streamline guest communication that’s spread out over multiple different channels.
Automated messaging ensures that your guests get the information they need when they need it. Since you can interact with your guests with notifications and messages at the right time during their stay, you’ll help your guests discover relevant experiences and offers e.g. SPA packages, upcoming events, special meals at your restaurant, etc. Now you can tie effective communication directly with your ancillary revenue.
When you thoughtfully create every message that goes out to your guests, you’ll affect their choices and also be there 24/7 to answer their questions/requests.
Upselling as a way of improving guest satisfaction
At some point during their stay at your property, many of your guests will require additional services. Use this opportunity to send timely offers based on your guest preferences and context of their stay. When you frame your upsell and cross-sell offers so that they add value to your guests’ stay, you can expect to get value (in form of revenue) for your hotel in return.
Let’s look at some examples:
- Use automated messaging to send offers for upgrading their choice of the room in the days prior to their arrival
- Your guests booked a family room? Send them an offer for a special family dinner menu at your restaurant.
- Leverage local experiential offerings like authentic cuisine, museums, wine tasting tours, hiking excursions, sightseeing, etc. to help your guests make the most of their stay and capitalize on this amazing revenue opportunity.
When you’re messaging guests with offers through a platform like LasoExperience, guests can also purchase or book a service directly through the chat interface, which streamlines the buying process. Making every digital interaction with your hotel painless, including booking/buying additional services contributes to a more enjoyable guest experience.
Takeaways
Generating incremental revenue is directly tied to prioritizing guest experience and increasing the quality of service you deliver. In the age of experience, every single thing that you do, every aspect of service delivery, every piece of communication you send out to your guests, it all counts towards the quality of guest experience your hotel delivers.
With the right technology and processes in place, you can plan and execute the kind of guest experience initiatives that will result in more return customers and higher revenue.
LasoExperience takes care of the guests' entire journey with your hotel, from reservation to post-stay, opening up new revenue opportunities while focusing on guest needs. Contact us to have a chat and see how we can help!
