How Your Hotel Can Capitalize on Business Travel Rebound & Bleisure Travel Trends

The recovery of business travel and the evolution of bleisure travel globally highlights the importance of adapting to changing travel trends. Hotels that proactively embrace these trends and tailor their offerings accordingly position themselves as forward-thinking and customer-centric. This adaptability allows hotels to stay relevant and appeal to the evolving preferences of modern travelers.

• • According to a global 2022 survey of global travelers conducted by the American Hotel & Lodging Association, bleisure travel doesn’t seem to be a passing fad. The survey found that 89% of respondents wanted to add some leisure time to their next business trip.
  • Business travel globally continues to trend up YoY since 2019 according to a January 2023 poll conducted by the Global Business Travel Association. The corporate travel expenditure allocation was recorded as follows: 28% for meetings with current or prospective customers, 20% for internal company meetings, and 18% for conferences or industry events.

• • • For the first time since January 2020, the Skift Travel Health Index has seen its global score move beyond 100, indicating that global tourism is now performing better than it did before the pandemic. There have been regional gains across the board.

Bleisure travel and the recovery of global business travel present a unique opportunity for hotels in several ways:

1. Maximizing occupancy
The combination of bleisure and business travel allows hotels to maximize their occupancy rates. Business travelers often have higher room demand on weekdays, while leisure travelers tend to fill in the gaps during weekends and slower periods. By attracting both segments, hotels can achieve higher occupancy levels throughout the week, ensuring a steady stream of guests and revenue.

2. Extending length of stay
Bleisure travelers typically extend their stays to enjoy leisure activities after their business obligations are complete. This longer duration of stay provides hotels with more room nights booked, increasing their overall revenue. Hotels can benefit from offering appealing personalized packages and amenities that entice bleisure travelers to prolong their visit and explore the destination.

3. Ancillary revenue opportunities
Bleisure travelers are more likely to spend on additional services and amenities beyond the basic accommodation. This presents hotels with opportunities to generate ancillary revenue. Whether it’s dining at hotel restaurants, using spa facilities, booking meeting rooms, or availing themselves of business services, bleisure travelers tend to have a higher spending potential, contributing to the hotel’s overall revenue streams.

4. Building customer loyalty
Delivering a positive and seamless bleisure travel experience can contribute to building customer loyalty. Satisfied bleisure travelers who have a positive impression of the hotel are more likely to choose the same hotel for future business trips or leisure getaways.

Due to the distinct needs and preferences of the two distinct customer segments – business travelers and leisure travelers – hoteliers can maximize profitability by leveraging an integrated B2C and B2C CRM. Here’s how a hotel would benefit from leveraging both CRM systems together:

1. Ability to leverage marketing automation
Engage accounts and guests with the right interactions throughout their entire journey using automated journeys, segmentation and dynamic content that powers relevant and personalized experiences. Build and create journeys to automate the full campaign lifecycle. With an integrated CRM, sales and marketing teams can focus their attention on revenue generative activities such as closing deals and building relationships with clients and eliminate manual, time-consuming, and repetitive tasks.

2. Tailored marketing and communication
Corporate and leisure guests require different marketing and communication strategies. An integrated CRM enables hotels to enhance their marketing as it effectively adapts the messaging based on the type of guest and their type of stay.

The integration of your PMS data into your CRM is equally important as this allows hotels to support integrated campaign management for both audiences and be able to measure revenue and performance of marketing campaigns.

3. Centralized data source and a holistic view for accounts and guests
Use this view to enhance the guest experience, including within the sales pipeline to drive demand across their corporate business. A connected B2B and B2C CRM can include the most important metrics for the hospitality industry: profile, reservation, and production data – all in one central profile. Deeper insights provide deeper segmentation and meaningful interactions, resulting in better information gathering and tailoring of experiences, ultimately resulting in generating more profitable revenue.

4. Integrated business intelligence
Siloed data creates blind spots for hotel marketing and sales teams, resulting in misleading data intelligence, inaccurate communications, wasted time, team coordination issues, and many missed opportunities. Implementing a B2B and B2C CRM integrated solution helps to keep track of everything and facilitates wide-range visibility. With business intelligence you can get the most of your CRM data, which is essential for treating every account and every guest like a VIP and for increasing your sales and marketing team productivity.

By leveraging an integrated B2B and B2C CRM solution, your hotel is empowered to effectively tackle all the elements above in a seamless, consistent manner. Not only will hoteliers be able to meet the specific needs of the different customer segments, but they’ll also have an enhanced ability to deliver targeted and relevant communications to each customer segment in a holistic manner. It will also enable hotels to extract insights and make informed decisions based on the blended traveler type.