Definitely Doug
It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
Much has been written about travel as an experience rather than just a destination. While some hotel guests may arrive with a complete schedule of business activities or leisure plans, many have both the time and desire to experience the place they are visiting. The city may have its usual attractions, but we often forget that some of the most important experiences may be the ones right in the hotel’s neighborhood, where a guest who may have only limited time can still enjoy them.
Are your hotels capitalizing on this trend in a way that will attract digital natives? According to a
study published by ALICE, 81% of consumers want to receive recommendations from hotels for local experiences. And particularly with respect to the hotel’s immediate neighborhood, no one is better equipped to provide those recommendations. Traditionally this has been the role of the concierge, but even for the diminishing number of hotels that employ a live concierge, some guests prefer the digital approach. Further, the concierge may not be available when or where the guest needs them. My own experience is often trying to find them after I get back from dinner or early on Saturday morning, and this has rarely been successful!
To be sure, you can link your hotel website or mobile app to existing travel and visitor guides to provide local information. But these have significant drawbacks. First, they don’t make it easy for the guest that finds herself with an unscheduled hour and wants to see something interesting, because they tend to list all of the attractions in the city, 99% of which are not close enough to be relevant. Second, they are usually advertising-driven, meaning they only list things that advertisers will pay for, not the many things that are free (or that are provided by operators who can’t or don’t want to pay the advertising fees). Third, they appeal to the masses, not necessarily to your hotel’s specific clientele. Fourth, while they can do a good job of covering things like restaurants and museums, they are poor at answering questions like “what’s a good 5 mile jogging route from the hotel,” or “I have an hour to see the neighborhood, what are a couple of interesting things I could see?” Fifth, most don’t do very well with short-term events, such as street fests or art fairs, which could be great options for guests who are there when they happen. And finally, generic city guides do nothing to improve your search rankings for guests looking for hotels near a particular attraction, because they’re not a part of your website.
If your website, mobile app, or in-room tablet is not providing good, local-neighborhood experiences, curated for your customers and written up in a way that will get their attention, then you may be missing an inexpensive opportunity to make your guests’ experience more memorable. And while it’s possible to create and manage the content on your own, there is a growing number of third-party providers who can do it for you at low cost and little to no effort. The best ones can support the full range of digital strategy, from embedding on your website to a link in prearrival emails, from mobile app to in-room tablet, from lobby kiosk to the guest-room TV. Some even support reviews (by hotel guests) of the recommendations.
Quality of content matters. In evaluating a product, ask if the provider can measure how much time guests spend looking at it. Especially on your website, more time spent there means improved SEO rank. Some of the products provide professional travel writers, while others leave it the hotel to provide the content.
Also consider whether and how to try to monetize referrals via commissions. If you’re providing valuable referrals to local merchants and if they are willing to pay for that, then you want a platform that provides some way to track referrals. But avoid the temptation to let this influence the choice of what’s included in the neighborhood guide. The critical issue is making sure your guests have a great experience and recommend your hotel to others, not earning a few extra dollars in commissions. To this day, I won’t stay at a particular 5-star luxury hotel in Boston because 20 years ago the concierge sent my party to a simply horrible local restaurant, and it could only be because they were greasing his pockets. That’s obviously a bad strategy with a human concierge, and just as unforgivable to do digitally.
To be sure, traditional guest mobile platforms like Intelity, iRiS, Runtriz, or Crave may (depending on how it’s been deployed) meet many or all of the requirements for a neighborhood guide. If you have such a platform, you should certainly evaluate how well it can meet the need. But if you don’t, you need not buy one just to deploy a great neighborhood guide, there are vendors who will sell you just that one piece. And even if you do have one, you can evaluate it better by first looking at what some of these innovative young companies are doing. A few that have caught my attention, and that meet most of the criteria mentioned above, are
Arrivedo,
Frictionless Guest, and
GuestU. Do you know of others that support original, hotel-specific content?
Finally, a postscript to my article on Enterprise Service Buses in the
last Siegel Sez. A few days after that was published, we saw the public announcement of
Jonas Chorum, which is essentially MSI’s CloudPM product bundled with Jonas ARC. Jonas ARC is an ESB developed by Jonas Software to support both its hospitality and non-hospitality products, and it has been adapted to provide open APIs that can be used to access all Jonas Hospitality products as well as external third-party systems. It is similar to the ESBs mentioned in the earlier article and it will be interesting to see how Jonas develops its market over time.
Douglas Rice
douglas.rice@hosptech.net
Twitter: @dougrice
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