If you’re out for the evening and run into a friend or acquaintance, you have certain expectations. You expect them to recognize you, remember your name and interact with you based upon information they have gathered about you during previous interactions. You’d probably be disappointed, or even offended, if you had to start from scratch by telling them your name, or reminding them that your kids play on the same soccer team and that you once enjoyed a movie together.
Hotel guests who are acquainted, or even intimately familiar, with hotel properties or brands via multiple stays may feel the same disenchantment if hoteliers do not demonstrate knowledge of that relationship on property. Guests’ expectations to be recognized and valued can be met through a comprehensive, dynamic guest profile that is available through an advanced hotel operating system such as SkyTouch Hotel OS. Guest profiles play an important role in marketing efforts for good reason.
Enhanced Guest Experience and Loyalty
A robust guest profile can display information from name and email address to room type preference to whether a guest would like the morning paper. Notes can be shown that flesh out who the guest is and what they want. The ability to know and serve a guest on a granular level, such as having housekeeping adjust cleaning routines to accommodate a sensitivity to chemicals, leads to increased engagement, re-engagement and loyalty by enhancing the guest experience and meeting expectations to be known and appreciated. The SkyTouch Hotel OS guest profile encompasses a host of benefits for hotel marketing and operations as well as guests.
Increased Spend
When preferences are known, they can also lead to upsell opportunities. Guest profiles can move marketing efforts from pre-stay to stay to next stay by flipping the value proposition back to the hotel or brand. Upgrades can be suggested and amenities targeted all because the hotelier has gotten up close and personal with guests and moves to provide them what they are known to want and need. It’s a win-win proposition.
Brand Reinforcement
When cross-property guest profiles are built into the hotel brand operating system, superior service standardization becomes possible. Hotel A knows what the guest requested at Hotel B and can offer it before it is asked – perhaps something as simple as a room away from the elevator. When Hotel C comes into the picture and instantly reaps the knowledge of what happened at Hotel A and Hotel B, the guest experience begins to feel seamless and the brand, property and guest all reap exponential rewards. The SkyTouch Hotel OS includes a robust guest profile feature that captures all guest data pertaining to their stay within the platform and that data can be shared across multiple properties which helps to mitigate duplicate or inaccurate guest records and serves marketing objectives.
Reputational Boost
Guests who feel known and valued are happy guests. And happy guests are guests who Tweet, write glowing reviews and spread the love about properties and brands where they have had an outstanding experience. All of that equals the kind of reputational boost you can’t buy but can plan to produce through executing appropriate actions prompted by guest profiles.
SkyTouch is continually enhancing the guest profile feature of cloud-based SkyTouch Hotel OS to make it easier for hotels and hotel companies to know guests and meet expectations with execution. A comprehensive and dynamic guest profile is key to delivering the kind of superior guest experiences that drive bottom line performance through successful property- and brand-level marketing.
