By Amanda Cole
The “personal touch” has always been a necessary part of a good hotel stay. That one-to-one service, the ability to make customers feel like they’re at home, is what allows hotels to build strong relationships with their guests.
But what about before the stay? Or after?
Today, in a market oversaturated with options, the personal touch can’t end with a guest’s stay. To sustain customer loyalty, hotel brands need to create marketing strategies that leverage personalization across every touchpoint in the guest journey. In this digital world that includes channels like email, apps, ads, and more.
Start With Your Data
For personalization to work, you need a complete picture of the guests you’re trying to build lasting relationships with. That data also needs to be updated in real time. Travel plans can evolve quickly — hotels need to be able to provide content that’s relevant to guests in the moment.
And it’s not only your customer data that’s important, it’s also how that customer data connects to your data and inventory. If you send a guest a promotion to book a suite in your hotel, you need to make sure a suite is actually available.
Once you’ve established a unified view of data, you can then use that data to train AI, which will allow you to automate your personalization and scale it to all of your guests. AI could automatically update your email campaigns based on real-time room inventory, for example, ensuring you’re promoting suites that are actually available (to guests who will actually book them).
Pre-Booking Possibilities
Most travelers fit into one of two categories: the impulse buyer or the meticulous planner. Their journey and interactions will be entirely different, which means the kind of content you serve should be different. Using your data-driven knowledge of your customers and your hotel, you can appeal to both types of travelers with tailored experiences before a room is even booked.
A few opportunities for pre-booking personalization include:
- Using on-site banners to highlight tailored promotions, like family suite discounts for travelers that usually book with children
- Sending SMS reminders to guests that book around annual occurrences, like cultural events or holidays, incentivizing early booking and recommending available inventory
- Incorporating the scarcity principle with notifications like “10 others are looking at this”
- Creating abandoned browse email campaigns with content about the destination a customer was looking at, or abandoned cart campaigns that focus on specific searches like type of room
Pre-Stay Possibilities
And once a guest has made their reservation, you can begin to personalize their experience even further — still without them having set foot in the hotel. Examples include:
- Connecting a weather app to your marketing platform to enable dynamic weather updates in each customer’s email, highlighting what the weather will be like during their stay
- Using mobile app push notifications to share suggested activities for their destination or local restaurant recommendations
- Automating concierge text messages for a personal feel and enabling customers to engage with them directly
- Sending upgrade options to suggest a bigger room or one with a better view if available for their booking dates
With your knowledge of the area and data that helps you understand guest demographics and preferences, you have the power to enhance the guest experience long before check-in.
Post-Stay Possibilities
Even after the vacation is over, there are ways for hotels to continue connecting with guests in personalized ways. Sending a post-trip feedback survey is an ideal way to show guests that their input is valued, and to ensure you can improve recommendations for their next stay.
You can even tailor the feedback you solicit based on customer data. For guests that had children with them during their stay, you could ask if they took advantage of on-site child care centers. This could result in useful feedback, of course, but it could also serve to increase engagement during their next stay. (Maybe the reason they have no feedback to offer is because they didn’t realize those services were available.)
And further, you can use this survey to collect critical zero-party data around future vacation possibilities. If a guest notes that they would be interested in coming back in the summer, you could then use that data to trigger price drop campaigns around their desired vacation time.
Relationships That Last Past Checkout
There are few industries better suited to personalization than hotels, and few places where guests appreciate the value of personalization more. This has always been easy to highlight during guests’ stays, but for hotels that want to stay ahead of growing competition, it’s time to extend that experience further. In tailoring their marketing efforts — before, during, and after the stay — to guests’ preferences, habits, and real-time behaviors, hotels can build genuine relationships that last well beyond checkout.
