Imagine guests walking into your hotel and stopping at the front desk not to check-in and pick out a room, but just to chat about their trip, get their keys, and go.
As increasingly tech-smart guests, often referred to as the Digital Elite, manage most aspects of their lives and travel from their tablets and smart phones, hotel technologies, like advanced check-in, are rapidly gaining in importance. More customers today expect such self-service capabilities when it comes to check-ins, upgrade offers, and other packages. And effective electronic engagement also means an opportunity for hotels to get in front of their guests in real-time before, during, and after a stay. Because of this, savvy hotels are working to stay ahead of the curve by rapidly implementing this latest technology.
How it Works
More and more frequently, guests are making reservations and checking-in electronically. This is being done via Mobile Guest Engagement (MGE) platforms that work in concert with the hotel’s property management system (PMS). Through such a platform, they may also select a room of their own choosing via images of actual available rooms and their physical location within the hotel. To the hotel’s benefit, the mobile platform not only caters to what their guests want electronically, but as guest preferences, market behaviors and social media habits are learned by hoteliers through an MGE, it serves to provide a clearer picture of what matters to each guest—a picture that can prove invaluable to them and to your bottom line.
Enhanced Mobile Experiences, Enhanced Loyalty
As your guests enjoy a great mobile experience and are providing more information about what they like (and don’t like), they are also providing new customer touchpoints and so, new opportunities to interact not just electronically, but on a physical level as well. Knowing what pleases your guests can also help your staff increase the effectiveness of each guest encounter, amounting to more quality time with them—time not spent picking out rooms and checking them in. With increased quality time can come improvements in the guest experience that allow for even more touchpoints which means more personalized perks and promotions to reward loyalty in a truly meaningful way.
Win-Win
While you are building all of these new touchpoints with your guests and improving their experience, you are also building more opportunities to improve your bottom line. This is because increased contact points means increased push notifications, which means more upselling opportunities like room upgrades and pre-arrival purchases such as food, beverages, and spa services. In other words, new touchpoints help create new revenue streams.
The bottom line? By taking advantage of pairing an MGE with your PMS, virtually everything you do may now be designed to better serve your guests. And better serving your guests can only benefit your staff, your business, and ultimately your brand.
