Understanding your guests, providing a compelling value proposition, and being savvy about your operations can help a hotel beat their competitors in the race to secure strong occupancy at a good price.
To be successful, hoteliers need to balance the needs of their business with the ever-shifting expectations of their guests. It can be a tricky job – and with almost 2,500 hotels tipped to open this year and another 2,700 in 2024, competition to secure guests is heating up in the hotel industry.
So what can hoteliers do to stay ahead of the competition? Personalising the guest experience is key, along with keeping an eye on the reputation of their hotel, and using tools such as automation to improve hotel operations.
Personalising the guest experience
First-party data is essential for hotels to ensure they can provide service and experiences that are tailored to each guest. Understanding who a guest is – their motivations for staying, how, what and when they booked, who their travel partners are – helps a hotel shape guest engagement in a way that maximises guest satisfaction. It also helps boost revenues, with Siteminder reporting brands which use data increase revenue by up to 10%.
Data can also be used in a hotel’s planning, to build a forecast that allows for competitive pricing and maximising revenues, as well as post-stay analysis of the guest experience which can help a hotel improve future hotel offerings.
A PMS is central to any personalisation strategy – it’s the fuel for a hotel’s data-led strategy and vital to providing a personalised guest experience. SIHOT.PMS uses an unparalleled depth of data to help hoteliers shape their business strategy, integrating with other tools to provide full-service solutions, tailor-made to match each unique hotel group and individual property.
Reputation management
In an increasingly competitive landscape, word-of-mouth recommendations, referrals and online reviews are even more important in securing future business. As a potential guest starts to research their trip, they consider review sites as well as recommendations from friends, family, colleagues and other influencers, with negative comments easily swaying their hotel choice.
How a guest feels about a hotel begins from the time they start the research phase of their booking but it isn’t only shaped by reputation. Seemingly simple tasks – such as can a hotel be easily found online, with the website working on any device and once found, is it easy to book all the services a guest wants at the best price – can impact what a potential guest thinks of a hotel. As such, a hotelier needs to ensure their hotel website is up-to-date and fits the expectations of their target audience.
Reputation management often focuses on tasks such as monitoring review sites like TripAdvisor, but it can also be done on a one-to-one basis through simple tasks such as seeking guest feedback. Post-stay, understanding what a guest liked (or didn’t like) about their stay can help hotels improve their service.
A study by Cornell University found hotels should solicit feedback and encourage online sharing, but also that they are listening to the feedback, responding to guest comments in both words and actions. Even when a response is automated (such as a simple thank you), it increases the likelihood that a satisfied guest will share their positive experience, leading to financial gains by influencing future guests and breeding loyalty in past guests.
How to use automation to improve hotel operations
Automation is something of a buzzword in many industries today – and for a good reason. While the hospitality industry in many countries continues to suffer staff shortages, automation is available to help alleviate the administrative workloads of hotel operations teams, as well as improve guest communication.
Automated replies and chatbots free up reservations and reception teams by answering frequently asked questions. Pre- and post-stay emails can be triggered to encourage additional spend by guests, promoting services such as airport transfers, dining or room upgrades.
Even invoices can be automated, saving up to 75% of time spent on check-out at Reserva Alecrim Eco Suites Resort in Portugal. Using SIHOT’s solutions also helped the resort improve guest spend by 60% and saved 75% on time spent training new staff on operational systems, allowing them to focus on operational procedures instead.
Stay ahead of the competition
Hoteliers are faced with a tricky situation – staff shortages and operational challenges can harm the guest experience if not tackled, whilst more and more competition pops up, threatening market share.
By using technology – particularly automated solutions – to ease the workloads of staff and ensure consistency and promptness in guest communications, hoteliers can stake their claim as offering personalised, unique experiences that will have guests wanting to return again and again.
Find out more about how SIHOT’s solutions can help hotels stay ahead of the competition.