Timeless hospitality does not operate on a fixed set of rules that have been proven to work time and time again, instead, it is defined by hotels’ ability to remain relevant despite the ever-changing climate of the industry. So how do you achieve this?
Market to Your Niche
Much of guest dissatisfaction with an establishment actually stems from the guest and the hotel being the wrong fit for each other. In order for hoteliers to guarantee a certain level of service to their guests, they must first attract the right guests. Establishing what a “right guest” is in this context can be a bit tricky, as travel has been booming like never before resulting in high demand for rooms and services. Being fully booked no longer means what it used to. The freedom of last minute travel has changed the culture of booking, resulting in late cancellations and no shows becoming a staple of modern hospitality.
This fact coupled with lowering room rates in order to remain competitive on OTAs as Booking and Tripadvisor have resulted in a state of crisis for many traditional establishments. Your hotel can be overbooked and yet you can have no guarantee how many of those booking would actually come through. Your staff would have to provide a service for an increasing number of guests while at the same time the rates of your rooms keep dropping, diminishing your actual profit.
Many hoteliers have turned to guest personas as an aid for determining who they should market their services to. A guest persona is an analytical model of information meant to simulate your target customers. In order to build a marketing strategy that effectively attracts such guests, hotel managers are using up to six or seven such personas in order to determine what your most profitable target guests want and how to give it to them. With a strategic approach to guest acquisition, you can lay the groundwork for a profitable enterprise which will meet both your expectations and those of your guests.
Welcome Innovation and Implement it Wisely
One of the biggest disservices you can do to your business is to let it run on outdated hospitality software. Efficiency has not been a measure of human reliability for quite some time now, and in order for your staff to provide excellent service, they will need to be equipped with the tools that would allow them to consistently meet guest demands. Your property management solutions need to meet a minimum of three requirements in order to be worth investing in:
- The software needs to be cloud-based. No complicated installations and all troubleshooting are outsourced to the company that developed it.
- All hospitality solutions you use need to be fully integrated in order for your staff to share relevant information across different platforms.
- You should be able to choose which solutions you need the most and pay for those exclusively.
Having covered those you can focus on what resolving issues such as late cancellations and overbookings by adding an integrated channel manager that would allow your staff to keep track of all your listings across all distribution channels while simultaneously not having to worry about relisting late-cancellations on time as the solution does it automatically. With the right solutions at your disposal, you can manage multiple locations allowing staff to provide a stellar service regardless of the circumstance they’ve been put in.
Tip: Property Management System - Investing in the Future
Provide Exclusivity
The modern guest is always looking for an experience that can be tailored directly to their requests, and while on the surface it may sound capricious this way of thinking has provided hoteliers with a way to add more value to their services. If you give the guest the right tool for the job they will outline the perfect experience for themselves and hand it over to your staff to implement. Mobile solutions such as a hotel self-service app can help you upsell your guests on a selection of services, while also allowing guests the opportunity to take control of their stay.
The personalised guest experience is the main draw for guest loyalty which is why it takes top priority in any reputable establishment. Staff members are trained to both accommodate and encourage guests to indulge themselves while making sure that their demands are met in full. Their loyalty, in turn, would extend their value to your business as it would drive a repeated source of revenue.
Expand and Improve
“No company can afford not to move forward. It may be at the top of the heap today but at the bottom of the heap tomorrow, if it doesn’t." - James Cash Penney
What is left once everything is running smoothly? Taking on new challenges is how you guarantee that your current achievements will not eventually be reduced to a good year or two which came and went. Retaining success means investing in future endeavours which carry greater risks but also hold the promise of even greater profit. Consider your options when it comes to growing your business, should you open another location in a different city, tweaking your strategy to adapt to that market as well?
Or maybe you would like to focus your attention to elevating your hotel’s status by redeveloping your restaurant into own household name? That would certainly pose new challenges but the final result would guarantee a new steady flow of revenue for your establishment.
Focus on networking as others can reveal opportunities you may have otherwise overlooked until it was too late to profit off them. Your brand’s long term success relies on being in tune with the character of the industry but what’s most important is pushing the boundaries of expectations and looking for new opportunities to grow.