How can the guest experience strengthen guest loyalty?
To succeed, it’s vital to take the guest experience, so often left to OTAs, into your own hands.
The guest experience can be defined as being with the guest at every stage of their stay (before, during and after) and optimising interaction with them to achieve an ideal level of satisfaction.
By starting a dialogue with the guest, perhaps through a personalised email, you have the opportunity to give them a considerable amount of information relevant to their stay. It’s also a chance to make additional sales. You’ll get a better idea of the guest’s expectations before they arrive, and be able to offer them a personalised experience. Keeping the conversation flowing – via several channels – once the guest is at your hotel is becoming increasingly important, given the various needs guests may have. As we often state in our articles, post-stay communication demands all your attention because it determines your long-term relationship with the guest. Collecting guest feedback (and responding to it) gives you an opportunity to gain their loyalty, improve your operations and increase your visibility on the major platforms like TripAdvisor and Google.
A good guest experience lies partly in the element of surprise, or the “wow factor”. It’s important to know how to create an emotion in your guest, rather than just offering them your services to use. Understanding and anticipating your guests’ needs is the first step. You need to think about your guests’ main expectations before they arrive, and what makes your hotel unique. When better to strengthen a guest’s loyalty than when they’re staying in your hotel? Before gauging their satisfaction level after check-out, it’s necessary to take all the steps to make sure the experience your guest receives is a remarkable one. The guest experience is constructed at each stage of the stay and continues over the long term, and this is what lies at the heart of a hotel owner’s job.
To consolidate loyalty, you need to know your guests, and this needs to be achieved through segmentation. Each group has different expectations and needs, and to satisfy each one and offer them a tailor-made guest experience, you need to increase your interactions at each stage during the stay.
PARTNER
SUSTAINABILITY PARTNER
