Let me start this with a question.
When was the last time you thought about the quality of your hotel guest experience?
Must be ALMOST NEVER?
Even if you had, it must be 10-20% of the time! (Isn’t it?)
But you see my friend, the hospitality industry practically revolves around GUESTS and guest experience!
So even if you don’t want to, you NEED to shift your focus to providing a better guest experience, sooner rather than later.
Yet, many hotels ignore this fact. Instead, they focus on only one thing. Bookings. (Agreed?)
So, here’s what I’ll address in this blog about the guest experience you impart at your property.
Table of contents
Enhancing guest experience in hospitality: Why is it important?
At the moment, you must be delivering a decent (Read: ORDINARY) guest experience. But people don’t remember “decent”. They remember “EXTRAORDINARY”.
They remember personalized experiences, which connect with them. On the other hand, as technology advances (and evolves) your guests’ expectations also increase.
That is why it is essential for you to give your best shot when it comes to the guest experience.
- Your satisfied guests are a powerful marketing tool: Your happy guests will recommend your hotel to their family and friends. Through such recommendations, your hotel will welcome more guests.
- Positive guest experience is one of the best ways to build your brand: Satisfied guests will definitely give you good reviews. And you know one positive review possesses the power to draw 100 more guests. So with that, you can drive more revenue as well as bookings.
- One bad experience can lead 25% of guests to choose your competitors: You can suffer from a loss of these three important aspects of your hotel business:
- Guests
- Revenue
- Reputation
Now that you know the significance of excellent guest experience, let me tell you how you can make your guests happy.
Right from the time when your guests have booked their stay, to the time when they are leaving your hotel; you have to impart the best guest experience at every stage.
Thus, enhancing guest experience in a hotel is a never-ending process.
That’s why I have divided the ideas to enhance guest experience in different stages of your guest life cycle.
Improve your hotel guest experience with these 17 simple steps. Let us explore them one by one in detail.
How to enhance the guest experience before arrivals?
As a matter of fact, a guests’ journey with your hotel starts much before they are at your doorstep.
Now you’ll question me, HOW?
Generally, guests search for your hotel either on Google, OTAs, or metasearch engines.
To get more information about your hotel, they would explore your website. (Having said that it is crucial for you to have a hotel website. If you don’t have one, get it today!)
Provide an easy booking process
In any industry (especially hospitality), the first impression is the last impression! As we discussed above, your website is the first point of contact with your guests.
You must have an excellent hotel website that has all the necessary information along with your hotel’s high-resolution photos and videos. (Attractive enough to impel your website visitors to book directly from your website.) If you don’t have one, get it today!
#Protip: Other than website, also ensure that you have all the required information of your hotel on OTAs. Your listing on each OTA should be right and optimized.
As soon as they get landed on your website, their experience with your hotel begins at that very moment.
You can also display some ongoing deals or offers on your website to keep your visitors glued.
Most importantly, integrate a booking engine with your hotel website to let them book easily. Along with this, provide them with different options to contact you, in case they have any queries.
Well, how quickly your response to their queries is also important. (Certainly, you CANNOT AFFORD to neglect or miss any single query.)
Well, here you can explore the options of having a website chatbot to answer your guest inquiries and solve them right there. This will save your time and efforts, and even increase your website conversions.
When they land on your website, their experience with your hotel begins at that very moment.
Initiate communication before arrival
As soon as your guests have booked their stay, your first instinct is to send them a booking confirmation mail or hotel reservation voucher.
Well, you can turn this formality procedure into an opportunity to interact with your guests by sending them nicely designed booking confirmation emails. In this email or voucher, you can highlight your hotel’s amenities such as pick-up service, parking facility or so.
Other than that, send them personalized emails and messages, thanking them for choosing your hotel. You can also inform them about ongoing deals, promotions, packages, events, and concerts to be organized in your locality (If there are any).
You should not miss out sending an email just a day before they are arriving to be in touch with your guests.
In that email, you can add the Google Maps link to your hotel’s location to help them reach your hotel easily. (Don’t forget your contact details.) Or moving further, you can also keep them posted about your region’s weather and other details.
#PROTIP: Fetch your guests’ birthdays and anniversaries from your guest database. Send them messages and emails on/before their special occasions. Combine your wishes with some undeniable offers for them. (You can apply this strategy in any stage of your guest’s life cycle.)
Believe me, these gestures will surely have a great impact on your guests./guest experience
Offer early check-ins
There are many instances where you would get requests for early check-in.
I would suggest you should never deny those requests. Because by just managing their early check-in you are doing a great favor to them. Naturally, they will appreciate this and will form a great impression of your hotel.
By managing their early check-ins, I don’t mean to make them wait in your hotel’s lobby or corridors.
If your hotel policy permits, you can lead them toward their rooms. And if in some cases, any vacant room isn’t available, you can arrange their seating in a relaxation area or serve them with tea/coffee from your in-house restaurant.
These are a few ways to improve guest experience in hotels, even before they have arrived!
Now, let’s see,
How to enhance guest experience on arrivals?
Basically, your guests’ journey starts immediately after they have booked their stay with you. Since the first impression is the last impression, it becomes IMPERATIVE for you to give your best shot, when it comes to managing their arrivals.
Ensure smooth check-ins
Would you like to wait at the front desk of a hotel after a long journey? That’s a clear NO.
Similarly, your guests wouldn’t appreciate waiting for too long at the front desk.
Treat the customer like you would want to be treated. Period!
Brad Schweig
In this era of Alexa and Siri, it would be a disgrace if you don’t give a chance to your guests to perform self-check-in.
These days, self-check-in kiosks are in trend to improve the hotel check-in process. Some hotels opt for a smarter option and that is – mobile self-service portal. From this portal, guests can perform self-check-in, check-out, request for the extra services, oversee their bills and several things.
With such technology,
- You can automate the communication between the front desk and guests.
- You can deliver an excellent guest experience.
- And the best part is your front desk personnel can welcome your guests with a sparkling smile.
Address your guests personally
When it comes to customer experience, personalization is the key.
And let me tell you,
Your guests simply LOVE personalization!
Of course, they don’t exactly know about the term. But yes, they will remember you if you make them feel valued through “personalized” services. It is a surefire way to improve your hotel guest experience.
Basically, you can train your desk personnel to greet your guests by addressing their first name or last name, instead of just greeting. If you’re going to welcome international guests, prepare your staff to greet them in their regional language.
For example: “Hi. Good afternoon, Mr. Hannes. Welcome to Avalanche Resort. Hope you have a pleasant stay at our resort.”
#PROTIP: Never address your guests with the room numbers. I repeat NEVER! (It makes them cringe!!)
Such extra efforts can enhance your guest experience to another level.
Other than these two methods, we have listed numerous other ways to enhance your guest experience at arrivals. Explore them from here.
#PROTIP: If you can, have a 360-degree video or VR walk-through of your entire hotel, room types, facilities, and even nearby scenic destinations.
How to enhance guest experience during-the-stay?
This is a very important stage in your guest life cycle, where you have to be very careful with your services. Well, I have listed some assured ways to enhance your hotel guest experience during the stay as well.
Ensure cleanliness and maintenance
Believe me, most of the complaints on your front desk are for cleanliness. (and it totally ruins your guest experience.)
You can overcome this issue with a simple arrival list. Generate your daily arrival list from your hotel software and ensure the housekeeping of rooms beforehand. As per the total arrivals, arrange the staff shifts and make them available to serve the arriving guests.
Nevertheless, you shouldn’t ignore the linens and towels. Always, verify that you are keeping fresh, clean linens and towels.
You should also check whether the electronic appliances in the rooms are in working condition or not. Now, practically it won’t be possible for you or your staff to check all the electrical appliances.
These days, hotels opt for smart maintenance. They install sensors that detect leaking taps or faulty lights which can trigger actions to either repair or replace them.
When you know the issue beforehand, you can arrange an alternative room easily.
Moreover, some hotels have smart electric appliances in which there are quarterly maintenance reminders to keep them up-to-date. When all your appliances are maintained or on a regular basis, you’d hardly have any maintenance issues.
This will reduce the number of complaints from the guests and will be an add-on to your hotel guest experience.
Level up your in-room amenities
Looking at the current scenario, I’m sure WiFi must be among your basic amenities.
As more guests opt to travel with laptops, smartphones, and wearables, ensure that your hotel Wi-Fi is equipped to handle the extra bandwidth needed by all these devices.
Some hotels offer a temporary Netflix or Amazon Prime account to the guests. You can see if you can offer that. On the same lines, some hotels offer a library of movies with regional subtitles.
Moreover, these days, tech-savvy travelers have high expectations from hotels.
You can provide them keyless entry to their rooms. (Keyless doors that open automatically when the guest arrives is one thing that is in trend these days.)
Other than that, you can have voice-chat enabled rooms with assistants like Amazon Alexa. Hotels can configure Alexa to allow guests to control and adjust the in-room features.
You can explore other such smart IOT-enabled solutions from here.
Offer your hotel’s relevant amenities (quickly!)
During your guest’s stay, offer them your hotel amenities by sending them messages. (You can even reach out to them personally.)
Now, I would recommend offering amenities by knowing the type of your guest. If your arriving guest is a business traveler, then you can offer him meeting spaces or co-working spaces at your hotel.
Similarly, if they are leisure travelers you can offer them a spa or steam bath. Or you can even offer them guided tours to your locality.
Your guests will certainly admire these endeavors from your end.
Amid all these activities, don’t forget to ensure the promptness of your service. Your guests definitely won’t prefer a delayed room-service.
Make sure that you serve them quickly with whatever they have asked for.
#Protip: Whenever your guests request for any service, you should inform them the approximate time by when you will deliver the requested services. So your guests can know for how long they have to wait exactly.
Train your staff to be attentive
Your staff is the ultimate point of contact for your guests, so it is essential to train them to deliver a better guest experience. Pay attention to your staffs’ qualities in the following areas:
Communication
Around 71% of the people love to hear their own name.
- Instruct your staff to welcome their guests by calling out their last name. For instance: “Hi. Welcome, Mr. and Mrs. Jacobs.”
- Teach them to be polite in any situation.
Observation
Observation is one of the important skills that your staff should have for remarkable guest service.
Let these examples explain to you better.
- If your staff is checking-in a group of guests who are tired after a long journey, then they should offer them some refreshments.
- If there’s a group of young adults or teens, then they should suggest to them nearby musical concert or offer coupons of bar and pub.
- They should also have the agility to walk around the common areas and interact with your guests by asking about how they’re enjoying their stay.
Appearance
Your staffs’ appearance and body language has a huge impact on your guests’ experience as well as on your hotel’s reputation.
- Make sure your staff is dressed up in neat and pressed uniforms/clothes.
- They should have a welcoming body language. (Trust me, it impacts your services a lot.) A timid and lazy body language won’t impress your guests at all.
Give complimentary services and gifts
It is important for you to show the guests that you care and for that, it is important to create emotional triggers.
People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care.
Teddy Roosevelt
Trust me, offering these small gifts and goodies enrich your hotel customer service.
This is how you can create emotional triggers:
Example 1: Let’s say, a family with kids is staying in one of your rooms. You can put some toys in the room before they check-in. You can also ask if they require babysitting services.
Similarly, for the newly-weds, you can keep a bottle of complimentary champagne.
Example 2: From your arrival list, find the number of guests who are checking out early. You can offer your drop-off facilities to those guests.
In the above case, if some of your guests have taken the continental plan then, you can make arrangements for breakfast before they depart or can ask them if they would like to take the breakfast along with them.
Remember their preferences
As I said earlier, personalized guest service is a surefire way to please your guests.
Advanced hotel management systems help you achieve this at a pretty good level. These systems save your guest preferences along with their basic details. Whenever the guests come back, the system remembers this and alerts you to make arrangements accordingly.
Even the smallest things like newspaper, coffee flavors, room view, floor choice; the system keep a track of all this information.
In such a case, your front desk personnel can greet your guests like this,
“Hi. Mr. Hannes, welcome to Avalanche Resort. We have already kept extra linens and a black coffee as you have requested during our previous stay. Enjoy your stay.”
(*Mr. Hannes goes all smiles*)
This is how you can deliver a personalized guest experience.
These are really small gestures, but trust me, it will have a great impact on your hotel guest experience. Your guests will certainly remember these extra efforts and appreciate them.
Engage with them on social media platforms
At present, social media has become an inseparable part of people’s life. You might have noticed, as soon as the guests have entered your hotel, they’ll instantly post their check-in on Facebook.
And this is followed by taking quick selfies, tagging your hotel in their pictures and other such activities.
Now, your part is to respond to all these activities. It’s the perfect time for you to engage with your guests. Your instant responses will encourage them to post more content and create memories with your hotel on social media platforms.
Ensure that you like, comment and share this user-generated content and spread it on all your social media platforms. To simplify this process, we have FREE Facebook and Instagram post templates.
(Even if it is as small as a star rating! Respond, share and celebrate!)
Thus, impart the best hotel customer service experience and empower your online presence too!
Listen to your guests’ complaints patiently
Listening is of great significance when it comes to guest satisfaction. Be all ears to your guests, when they are requesting, suggesting or complaining.
Whenever you listen to their complaints calmly, they are more receptive to the offered solution.
Active listening helps to avoid any miscommunication. It ensures that the expectation of the guests is clearly understood.
By adopting these ways, you can easily enhance your guests’ experience during their stay. Now let’s talk about how to enhance their experience at departure.
How to enhance guest experience on departure?
Your role of imparting the best guest experience doesn’t get over on departure. Even at departure, you have to ensure certain things. Let’s explore them:
Provide easy check-out process
Just as check-in, make sure that you have an easy check-out procedure too.
To assist you in that, advanced hotel software can be at your rescue. Every day you can generate a departure list and based on that, get their pending bills ready.
If there is a group of guests staying at your hotel, then dividing or merging their charges, you should perform all these activities beforehand.
Reach out for feedback
Last but not the least, reaching out to your guests to ask them about their stay is also one of the key hotel guest satisfaction ideas.
Encourage your guests to give you reviews on different platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, your website, OTAs, or travel websites like TripAdvisor.
Now, taking reviews is not enough. Spare time to respond to all your reviews punctually, especially to the negative reviews.
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
Bill Gates
For a punctual response to all your online reviews, you can consider having a review management software. (And to assist you more, we have ready to use FREE review response templates as well)
Suffice to say, analyzing your reviews will help you find out the strengths and shortcomings of your hotel. Based on suggestions and comments, re-train your staff to ensure that those errors and mistakes are not repeated.
Also, send a small thank you note to guests and invite them to visit again to experience the change.
These are some of the assured ideas to enhance the guest experience in hotels during the stay. Now let’s see, how can you stay in touch with your guests post-departure
How to enhance guest experience post-departure?
You may ask that after the guests have departed, how can I deliver a better experience to them?
Well, don’t you want to bring them back? See, there would be 100s of other options available when they want to book their stay. Among all these options, how they will remember you and choose your hotel again? For that, this is how you can stay connected with them after their departure.
Engage with them post-departure
Once your guests have left your hotel, it doesn’t mean that he’s not going to come back.
Send them regular newsletters, deals, and offers.
It is in your hand, how you stay in touch with them. To do that, you can send them monthly newsletters and promotional emails highlighting your deals, offers, newsletters, and so on.
Make sure that you don’t send it too frequently, and that your emails go in the spam box.
Make efforts to bring them back
There are a plethora of different accommodations options for your guests. The industry is getting more competitive day by day.
Amidst these 1000s of the other options, if some guests are choosing you, then you should certainly reward them. For that, loyalty programs are an assured way. You can reward your repeat guests as well as attract new guests to enroll in your loyalty programs.
Don’t follow the stereotypical rewards of giving a free stay for a day unless certain points are collected.
Innovate your loyalty programs and always offer them something of real value such as a free drink on the second visit, late check-out facility on the third visit and other such rewards.
#PROTIP: Managing your loyalty programs gets better with loyalty program software.
In addition to this, whenever they are staying at your hotel, greet them personally, ask them about how their stay was at your hotel, walk an extra mile to fulfill their additional requirements. Here are some more ways to increase repeat guests at your hotel.
Leave no stone unturned when it comes to serving your repeat guests.
Key takeaways
The best hotel guest experience is all about:
1. Personalized touch
2. Accuracy
3. Punctuality
4. Extra efforts from your end.
That's it!
Conclusion
I’ve already mentioned at the beginning of this blog post that the hotel guest experience you impart will have a direct impact on your revenue, as well as reputation.
Besides, there’s never a one service fits all. Your hotel will encounter a variety of different guests – demanding, fussy, rude, calm, understanding.. and the list continues.
You have to deal with all this ethos calmly and put your best foot forward in making your guests’ stay memorable.
Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.
Walt Disney
Delivering the best hotel customer service experience can be a marketing as well as a revenue-generating strategy.
Try all of these guest satisfaction ideas for your hotel and make headway for better business. Share this blog if you liked it in your networks!
