Hotel Guest Personas: Attract and Retain the Right Type of Guests

Robert and Daniel were business partners. But due to some clash, they parted ways and started their own hotels.

While Daniel is running a successful hotel near a beach, Robert is struggling to make a profit.

It’s not that Robert wasn’t quick on the trigger, it’s just Daniel had a bee’s knees approach.

Daniel’s idea of tapping into hotel guest personas paid off well.

If you don’t know what a guest persona is and its role in hotels, just read on.

We will take a deep dive into this fantastic method of understanding your customers’ needs, experiences, behaviours, and goals.

What is a Guest Persona?

A guest persona is a fictional character that a hotel creates to describe its ideal guests. Simply put, it is a representation of a hotel’s guest demographic that is likely to stay at the property.

Further, hotel guest personas not only tell you about the type of your guests but also about their challenges and decision-making approach. 

Its role in business

The immediate role of a persona is to help businesses gain the trust of their customers.

Let me explain with a no-brainer.

Why do people prefer to stick to a brand? It’s because that particular brand has successfully built a bond with its customers by delivering exactly what their customers were looking for.

But how did they do it? Or how a business does this, in general?

By creating tailored products and services using personas.

When you have a complete understanding of your ideal customers, you can:

• build products according to your customers’ preferences;
• create effective marketing strategies;
• generate more qualified leads;
• help your sales professionals in building rapport with your target market;
• and let your customer service team address issues and concerns with the right pinch of personalisation.

Why do hotels need guest personas?

Now let’s talk about personas from a hotel’s perspective. 

For a hotel to become profitable, it is important to have solid strategies. And one such strategy is the creation of hotel guest personas.

When hotels create guest personas, they get the advantage of delivering a personalised experience to their guests, and in turn, gain trust, loyalty and increase repeat bookings.

Many of you might argue that catering to only a few types of hotel guests won’t be profitable. And I understand that too.

Of course, you would be welcoming different types of guests in your hotel. It’s not necessary to stick to one.

However, you have to understand that every hospitality establishment has a core demographic. They are the ones that are more likely to stay loyal. 

Let’s take Daniel’s example.

Daniel’s hotel is located near a beach and it mostly has surfing enthusiasts as guests. But does that mean he doesn’t let any other types of hotel guests stay at the property? No, right! It is just that surfers are the ones who come back often. Meaning, they help him generate revenue constantly.

With the right set of detailed, data-driven guest personas – everything, from distribution to marketing to revenue management, falls into places.

When Should Hotels Create Guest Personas?

Right from the very moment you start acquiring guests’ data.

Guest Personas aren’t static. With time and accurate data, you learn more about your guests. Meaning, you can integrate new insights (such as guests’ changing demands) and make your personas as detailed as possible.  

So, there’s nothing like “you can only create personas after one year of operation”. Period. 

How to Build Guest Personas for Hotel?

Before we jump right to the points about creating hotel guest personas, I have a little something to tell you.

Frame questions around the points I am going to list down below. Ask yourselves those questions and note down all the answers. Now, arrange those inputs and interpret them into traits. Once you do that, try to create a fictional character with all the traits. That’s a persona! 

Further, if required, you can also ask those questions to your colleagues and create different personas.

This activity will give you an idea about the entire process.

Now, let’s get to the points.

1. Data gathering

Use Google Analytics

Google Analytics is undoubtedly one of the top tools for understanding digital users and their interactions with your website.

This tool provides you with detailed reports based on behavioural data collected from users on your website. And it can be used to create buyer personas.

Here are some of the reports you can use:

• Audience reports: presents insight into your users’/guests’ characteristics
• Behaviour reports: shows what your visitors/guests do on your website
• Acquisition reports: tells you where your visitors originated from or how did they reach you (for example, through search engines, social networks or website referrals)
• Conversion reports: shows how your goals (the ones you are tracking) are performing

Use social media analytics

Your social media platforms are much more than just sharing updates about your hotel. It provides you with real-time marketing opportunities.

It’s just you have to dive deeper into data and identify your followers’ or potential guests’ pain points to tweak your strategy.

Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are three of the top platforms that can provide you with insights that can be implemented in the persona creation process. 

Here’s what you can look at:

• Interests: the type of content your users are inclined towards
• Demographics: classification of your audience into age, gender, race and other categories
• Platform preferences: shows which platform is preferred mostly by users to obtain more post engagement
• Page views: shows how many people viewed your post
• Post performance: tells how did your post perform in a certain time frame

According to a report by Socialnomics, 82% of businesses who invest time in creating detailed buyer personas deliver better value and convert more leads into customers.

Collect CRM data

Every hotel uses a CRM. However, not many use this tool to explore other segments.

It is a powerful ally for hotels because of what it brings to the table. It provides hotels exactly what they need to create detailed personas of their guests.

Here are some must-have CRM Data:

• Identity Data (name, mailing address, phone number, etc.)
• Descriptive data (family details, lifestyle preferences, career etc.)
• Quantitative Data (booking records, website visits, tickets, engagements etc.)
• Qualitative Data (guests’ attitude, motivation, behaviour etc.)

All these data help you create a character of your guests which you can use to deliver a personalised experience.

Look at the booking patterns

It is one of the most important pieces of information you need to keep a keen eye on. You have to determine the triggers that lead to the best conversion ratio.

Why is it important?

Identifying booking patterns help you create an opportunity profile. And when this profile matches your hotel’s traits, you can curate relevant content or marketing pieces to target that profile.

For example: You have a guest who has visited your property only when there was an offer going on. What his booking pattern shows that he is inclined towards discounted rates. So, you can always drop him emails regarding your ongoing offers.

Take inputs from staffs

Apart from relying on tools, there’s another way of gathering inputs.

I am sure hotel staff — be it the front desk, housekeeping, or POS, they all keep a keen eye on guest behaviours. Hence, it is advisable to speak to your hotel staff regarding the guests.

For example: You can ask your housekeeping staff what kind of guest behaviours they have witnessed in the last week. Or ask your in-house restaurant staff regarding the type of food they have served. You can ask all the relevant questions and extract the much-needed information.

Use guest reviews

Reviews about your hotel speak volume. So, make sure you’re not overlooking them.

Keep a track of all the reviews and feedback you receive. Be it positive or negative. Draw every sentiment from them to integrate into your guest personas.

We know that the best way to drive positive change is to learn from our mistakes and hear what our customers have to say. Our companies thrive off customer feedback. It helps us to innovate and disrupt, and keeps us relevant.” 

Richard Branson, Founder, Virgin group of companies

Take inputs from travel agents

Travel agents (both online and offline) are nothing less than goldmines. They don’t just provide you with bookings, but they also hold some of the important insights from the market.

Do take out to gather inputs about guests from your travel agents. Enquire about all the details (even the tiniest ones) and put them together to craft a persona.

Survey your guests

Surveys are also a great way to understand your guests.

You can create pre-arrival and post-stay surveys with aptly structured questions to gather customer feedback.

Capture the most relevant data from the responses to make your personas more detailed.

#ProTip: Instead of creating a survey all by yourself, you can turn to dedicated tools for this task. There are many reputation management tools available that will do the job for you.

Conduct individual interviews (if required)

If you want your hotel guests personas to be impeccable, you must try this. This type of data gathering might not be a feasible option for many hotels. However, that doesn’t mean it’s of no use.

Conducting individual interviews with different types of guest in the hotel could be of great benefit. Reviews and surveys cannot do what a face to face conversation can.

Even though it’s difficult, I would suggest you try it out with a selected number of guests in the beginning. And if you think you can scale it, then increase the number going forward.

2. Data organisation

Once you’re done collecting all the data, it is time to organise it.

For a better understanding of all your other departments, it is advised to use certain parameters (or you can also call it segments).

Parameters? Here’s what I mean by that.

Consider these four parameters (or segments):

• Purpose of stay
• Demographics
• Motivation/intent/behaviour
• Preferences

Start adding all the data in them accordingly.

Furthermore, the reason I am asking you to consider these segments is that you don’t have to create a profile for every single guest. Rather, create segments based on traits. These segments will act as an umbrella profile for a group of guests.  

3. Profile development 

Developing profiles with the data could turn overwhelming. So, I would suggest you keep things minimal at the beginning.

Start with 1 or 2 profiles. And as I mentioned above, it’s a continuous process, you can always revisit them and use new insights to make necessary changes or add more profiles.

Now, let me make this interesting for you.

DO NOT take it all on yourself to create the personas. I suggest, you rather work with a team.

You ask, why?

Not everyone has the same experiences, and it is important to have different perspectives while doing this task.

Here are some things you can consider:

• Form a team and then divide it into groups
• Present all your findings (the data, basically) to them
• Decide, as a team, which personas should you create
• Ask each group to work on one persona with the data

I know, this sounds a little aspirational, but it does work. You don’t want to act like a machine and generate generic personas like millennials, GenZ, baby boomers etc.

Rather, try something different, give your personas name and allot certain characteristics. Not to mention, make them as realistic as possible.

How about “Denver, the stay at home father”?

Word to the wise: To reduce your efforts, there are several other persona creation tools available. You just have to Google to find them. My personal favourite is HubSpot’s Make My Persona. Try it if you want!