It’s critical for hoteliers to maximise engagement in every way so they can serve their guests better. The quantity of guest experience is important, but in doing so, some may compromise the quality of the engagement. Portier introduces 3 ways for hoteliers to maximise guest experience without having to compromise the quality. Quality guest engagement is vital when hotels want to upsell any ancillary services that are on offer - this translates into additional hotel revenue.
Hoteliers can do this in 3 ways.
Off-Property Engagement
Enhancing the Human Touch
Future-Ready Response Package
Maximising Travellers’ Wallets
1. Off-Property Engagement
Portier is designed to be the binding mechanism between guests and hotels and is built in a fashion that empowers hoteliers to expand their service excellence beyond the limitations of the physical property, thus, delivering improvements to the overall guest experience and making a measurable impact on hotels’ bottom line.
This proposed strategy to expand the guest experience beyond the boundaries that the hotel building has in place is possibly one of the most underrated ways in which hotel guest engagement can receive a sizeable boost. In fact, there is an obvious need to adjust the guest engagement and guest experience vision to now represent a wider "guest in-destination experience" anchored, driven and led by the travellers' selected hotel properties.
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This need for expanding the reach of the hotel ultimately comes from the necessity for an increase in hotel guest engagement. This is a topic we have covered on many occasions, as it's also the core of our belief system when it comes to the main benefits we deliver to hotels. The bottom line of this belief system is that an increase in hotel guest engagement will have a paramount impact on both the guest experience and the financial bottom line of the hotel. The right hotel guest engagement strategy can impact a hotel's income generated from each guest by as much as 45%!
If technology is applied properly, technology can revive hotels' special access to the destination and empower a stronger relationship between guests and hotel staff, during a time when guests might need the support of hotel staff more than ever before in the history of this relationship.
2. Enhancing the Human Touch
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There is a common misconception among hoteliers that technology is here to replace hospitality jobs. However, the reality could not be more different. We understand that human interaction makes up the bedrock of the hospitality industry, what Portier does is to help to take it to the next level.
We believe that the technology we created can enhance the personal touch by revolutionizing the way guests and staff communicate with each other, hence facilitating key guest engagement and interaction - the crux of RevPAR.
To exemplify why the power of staff is critical in driving more revenue from each guest, we take a look at a study done by Trekksoft (2019). It is apparent that human interaction leads to a higher spend per head during the holiday booking process.
With reference to the above statistics, only around 18% of travellers experienced human interaction in the booking process, but that small group ended up contributing to almost half of the industry's overall revenue numbers for 2018. Between 2017 and 2018, human interaction in this procedure decreased by almost 6%, but the revenue contribution was virtually the same in both years. This simply means that when you focus on the quality of engagement, rather than the quantity, you can outclass hotels by making your human interaction more impactful.
3. Designing a Future-Ready Response Package
We learned that the power of human interaction is not to be undermined. Human interaction coupled with technology can make for a more significant revenue strategy when applied properly. Travellers leave behavioural breadcrumbs wherever they go and hoteliers will certainly benefit from a more dynamic approach to their business by equipping their hotel staff with relevant technology to pick up on these behavioural trends. Data gives hotels leverage, with hotels now being able to react to short-term changes will arguably equip hotel staff to better deploy their budgets in the future, and accepting regular business interruptions in the future will lead to a more comprehensive response package.
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
That response package includes both a more advanced digital infrastructure and a more flexible approach to running hotel operations, without becoming too dependent on specific traveller groups or seasons. Doing this will guarantee a more sustainable strategy for hotels moving forward and allowing more mitigation room for the hotel to work with. What’s more, designing such a response package will likely turn hotel staff into more rounded business professionals that align with both modern technology and traveller sentiments.
Today, the Portier Platform drives engagement rates of 80%, with each guest spending an average of 55 minutes on the platform while they explore the hotel and the destination. The inevitable result: Portier Technologies drives a measurable increase in guest engagement and guest satisfaction with significant growth results for hotels.
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