By Pete Melhuish - A seasoned cloud 'tech consultant' at IP Solutions with 18 years of coal face experience. Specialising in hospitality, I keep abreast on industry trends and help groups and individual hotels find better ways of working.
Brexit has led to a mini upsurge in room occupancy as international guests cash in on the weak pound. Instantly increasing hotel revenues for many. To add to this our resident population are keeping their feet planted for fear of the ever rising cost of a good G&T whilst abroad.
With disruptive new entrants to the market such as AirBnB now building their own hotel infrastructure, what can traditionally structured hotel groups do to stave off competition and remain relevant?
Timing is important. Guests are getting savvier and more mobile. There is a window of opportunity to grab more market share but it’s ever closing. What can you do to guarantee your hotel/chain’s future success? The simple answer is to innovate.
The steps below focus on the two key drivers every hotelier is measured by ‘Occupancy’ and ‘Guest Spend’. Providing a great service is no longer enough to guarantee success in these respects. Focus needs to be dispersed and an open mind should become your weapon of choice.
1. Install smart WIFI
Just about every guest that walks through your doors carries an internet connected device of some kind. The type of device, the way they use it, and the web pages they visit offer an unparalleled snapshot into the demographic of your customer. This information is critical to making decisions on staffing, marketing, and the hotels positioning. It may sound obvious but providing free and reliable WIFI should not be considered an opportunity not a cost (Forbes state that over 49% of business travellers consider free WIFI to be a deciding factor). Too many hotels provide the bare minimum and do nothing with the data.
2. Manage your inbound communication across all channels
Think about how many different ways you have of contacting your nearest and dearest. Besides the phone I can now contact Aunt Maude by Text Message, WhatsApp, Skype, Email, Social Media, and via her online blog. 55% of hotel bookings are now made on mobile devices. So you should not be dictating to your guests how they contact you, but supporting their choice in a uniform way across all platforms. Booking process has been sited again and again as a reason why guests do not remain loyal. Get it right, manage all channels and keep it central. Large chains like GLH/Thistle have been doing this for years and it’s time the rest of us all caught up.
3. Sell direct
Hotels.com, Trivago, and Bookings.com are a necessary evil, we all know that. You can book direct with every hotel/chain but it’s important to have your own ‘preferential’ direct offering and to make that more attractive to guests to use. You can interlink your revenue management system to your own online booking and provide a ‘Best Price Guarantee’. It also makes sense to offer an additional rewards such as a complementary drink that requires them to download your app for the code. This will further engage your guess with your systems and hopefully lead to further purchases.
4. Let the BOTS take over
No, we’re not talking about physical robot waiters that require retina scans before they serve you dessert. Robots (or BOTS) can be much simpler beasts. Chat-bots have been used by Radisson Blu Edwardian to revolutionise the way they provide room service. You can call a bot, text a bot, or blog a bot and assuming the hotel has your details from check-in the BOT can respond to your every waking need. A fully conversational BOT in multiple languages is an expensive thing to do, but a basic service that could take pressure off front of house staff at night is now within the financial reach of most hotels.
5. Aggregate Data – Increasing hotel revenue by numbers
Data is one of the most important assets to any business. The question is what are you doing to ensure you use that data to your business advantage? Often the answer is not much, but almost always it’s not enough. Part of the problem is there’s so much data from so many different sources. The real key to effective management is to properly conjoin these data streams. This will provide the sort of output that allows you to make predictive assumptions. This is not easy and you may argue ‘my revenue management system does this for me’ but that’s a single piece of the puzzle. Write a wish list of every question you would like to have answered from a hotel management perspective and then engage a data specialist.
In summary any one of these initiatives should have a positive effect on your bottom line. Implement them all and there’s no doubt you will achieve return on investment. I have only focused on five improvements and there are of course many other ways to improve occupancy and guest value. What this blog seeks to do is engage in free thinking conversation. If you have any thoughts, please get in touch or read more content from ‘Hotel Tech Weekly’ online.
