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How to Differentiate Your Guest Experience

In hospitality – an industry built on exceeding expectations in which customer experience directly correlates with increased revenue, repeat business and direct bookings – the answer is a whole lot.

Any discerning hotelier knows the difference between greeting a guest by ceremoniously asking “Have you stayed at one of our hotels before?” or welcoming them by saying “Welcome back to our property, Mr. Heyneker, would you like us to schedule you a tee time? We can also send up your favorite Sauvignon Blanc and some extra towels.” An informed welcome will not only improve guest satisfaction and increase loyalty, but could also lead to driving additional revenue.

Now, imagine what it would mean for a hotel brand or group to deliver such a customized welcome for each guest in its portfolio. What could that do for the brand’s guest satisfaction ratings? For its loyalty levels? For its revenue?

In hospitality – an industry built on exceeding expectations in which customer experience directly correlates with increased revenue, repeat business and direct bookings – the answer is a whole lot.

The key is to deliver a truly customized consumer experience in operations and marketing, and that requires the be-all and end-all of 21st century hospitality: data. And that data is everywhere –not only in our PMS systems and guest surveys, but also online. We live in a world in which 160 new contributions are posted per minute in TripAdvisor, 26,380 reviews are published on Yelp and 277,000 new tweets show up in countless timelines, and consumers are willing to share personal preferences in order to get more personalized service. But how do you keep up with and harness that flood of data?

At Revinate we want to enable hotels of all sizes to leverage data culled from disparate sources to deliver personalized guest experiences that create valuable relationships and lifelong customers. With our Rich Guest Profiles™, hotels get a single customer view with data from the PMS, online reviews, public social media profiles, survey responses, and transactional information all in one place. Those profiles lie at the core of our CRM and marketing automation solution, Revinate Marketing™, allowing properties to send messages to guests that are highly targeted and personalized. By better understanding who the highest spenders are or which guests happen to be wine lovers, brands can create more targeted marketing campaigns that drive over 50% open rates along with directly attributable booked revenue across all hotel types.

Provenance Hotels, a Revinate Marketing customer, uses the CRM and marketing automation platform to provide additional value for its loyal customers. For example, one of their hotels in Seattle has a partnership with a local theatre, where the hotel is responsible for selling a certain number of tickets. To sell the tickets, the hotel uses Revinate Marketing to select a very specific audience – past guests who are interested in theatre and live within driving distance of the hotel. In other words, those who are likely to buy a theatre ticket and book a hotel room. The result? All of the theatre tickets were sold, and the hotel succeeded in engaging and providing value for loyal guests.

Up until now, this level of access has been available on a property level only. Now, management groups and brands will be able to use Revinate Marketing to access guest data from multiple properties. The ability to understand guest’s experience across a corporate portfolio has the potential to be highly disruptive for smaller brands that don’t have the data analytics resources wielded by larger competitors. Now, even small groups can hyper-segment guests to develop targeted marketing campaigns that are proven to drive a 10:1 return on investment (ROI).

So, the next time a guest walks through the door, you have a choice: you can greet a complete stranger and make some guesses to determine what his expectations are, or you can welcome a guest whose expectations you can exceed because you know everything about his past stay history, preferences, and spend. What kind of host would you rather be?

Marc Heyneker is CEO of Revinate. Revinate is a rapidly growing SaaS start-up in Silicon Valley changing the hospitality industry. Revinate designs and develops technology to improve the guest experience at more than 25,000 hotels worldwide.

Company’s culture is focused on generating bold ideas and having the bravery to pursue them. The company has offices around the globe from NYC to Sydney and customers in 140 countries.

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