By Jon Croy
NASA originally coined the term “digital twin,” in reference to a virtual model of a physical product, process or service. The administration introduced the concept to solve complicated challenges they faced in the early days of space exploration.
Although the digital twin concept has been around for awhile, it is gaining traction in other industries – like hospitality. For hoteliers, a digital twin of a physical building provides an opportunity to understand guest needs and improve the customer experience across all channels. The most practical way to implement an indoor map for guest use is through an existing mobile app. If a guest has already installed the app, he or she already has a deeper relationship with the brand, meaning higher lifetime value than those who have not.
Below are three ways hotels can use location data from a digital map to improve the guest experience.
- Gather data frictionlessly. People naturally explore when they see a map as the background, thus deploying a map prompts guests searches. The items guests search for can reveal deeper insights about who they are as consumers. Did a guest search for the business center? The pool? Did they look at the exit plan? Did they review the options for ordering food nearby and call (from the number in the app) the local pizza joint for late night delivery? When designed correctly, a map within an app will would constantly capture feedback from guests searches. All of these searches are data points that should be captured and correlated to create digital marketing profiles to help hotels encourage like-minded individuals to download the app and attract more guests. For the hotel, an indoor map is simply a means to capture data that can augment digital marketing efforts and create hyper-contextualized content.
- Make better marketing decisions. In analyzing data gathered from the app, hoteliers could discover that their guests prefer certain restaurants over others. Using this information, they can create an affiliate relationship with these restaurants that could result in small, incremental revenue. While this may not seem like a lot of money, this revenue alone could pay for the foundational mapping service. Additionally, as discussed above, the hotel might develop new audience profiles for digital marketing that results in one new guest per hotel per month. Again, a small number, but the lifetime value of that guest is meaningful. What if that one new guest becomes an app user? My guess is that the lifetime value of this guest is 10 times that of a non-app using guest.
- Personalize the stay. It’s no secret that travelers prefer certain hotel brands over others. Indoor map functionality introduces another option for rewarding loyal guests for their business. Maybe a guest has specific preference about room location and could choose a room before checking in that suits his or her needs via the app. For example, light sleepers often prefer a room far away the ice machine and the elevator or the pool. What if the guest is greeted by the front desk agent with "and we have a room near the stairs for you" or "we have an east facing room for you,” based on inferred preferences. The possible applications for increased guest value are nearly endless.
Integrating an indoor map into a hotel mobile app could have benefits for both the guest and the hotel’s business strategy at large. Thus, in this case, even small hotels can have their map and use it too.
