Best Hotel Guest Engagement Ideas and Strategies for You to Stand Out

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Best Hotel Guest Engagement Ideas and Strategies for You to Stand Out

04/09/2024

Harman

With great power, comes great responsibility. With the power of making a guest feel at home, away from home, hospitality sector has the huge responsibity of enhancing guest services, satisfaction and engagement with the ever-changing times. As we restore our pre pandemic lives, cities are again brimming with travelers. Some come for business, and others for leisure, all looking to be served the best. Owing to this reason, it has become all the more important to employ hotel guest engagement ideas.

Making up for the lost travel time, guests would visit with higher expectations and specific ideas. You need to ensure that you cater to their needs and connect with them, all with your services and amenities. If you don’t, others will. Therefore, evolve and upgrade your practices with some easy to implement guest engagement ideas and strategies.

We have listed down some customer engagement ideas and practices that would help you reach, engage and serve your guests better.

Best practices/strategies for guest engagement at your hotel

Connecting with guests, serving them well and earning their loyalty, are the top most points on a hotel’s agenda.

Following hotel guest engagement strategies and ideas would enable you to enhance guest engagement and experience:

1. Be creative with your interactions and content

Your website should be well updated and fresh. Convey to your guests the ways in which you can make their visit more pleasant and unforgettable. Avoid ‘informing’ them through it your content, instead take them on a virtual tour with your words and pictures.

Interaction with a guest should start right after he/she has booked a room/service. Share a brief overview of the destination, its culture, attractions and history of the hotel, with the guest, via your preferred channel. You can also share some tips for their tour. All this need not be in a single exchange, you can send 2-3 emails/messages per week before their stay. This would keep them excited about the trip and show how thrilled you are to have them. This is an impactful guest engagement idea.It shows that you await their presence.

2. Know the purpose of a guest’s stay

Through pre-stay surveys, know what brings guests to the city/state/country. Leverage that data. If a traveler is visiting for business purposes, offer to arrange cab services. If it's for leisure or a celebration, pre-stock the rooms with additional perks. Personalize services based on the purpose of their stay. Suggest local activities to do, places to visit based on the data received.

3. Regular and smooth communication

This is a crucial customer engagement strategy. Once the guest has arrived, ‘communication is the key’ is your holy grail. However, it’s not humanly possible to be everywhere, every time a need/ query arises. Therefore, a chatbot could easily fill in and solve the problem. This automated service is smart enough to answer your queries. It’s sensitive enough to understand your emotions. And, quick enough to call for human intervention, round the clock. With Freddie, an AI conversational bot, all your guest queries are answered around the clock. Be inclusive with its multilingual nature.

4. Adjusting to the new normal

With the new normal demanding contactless services, hotels can go contactless with their check in/out. Read through ‘Improve Guests' Arrival Experience’ to understand how check in process could be made hassle free.

With e-Front Desk, you can provide guests with the service of checking in and out without contact. This way the process becomes paperless. Moreover, if your destination is bike friendly, offer your guests bikes to give them local, raw experience of the place. Both ways to go-green and do your bit.

5. Bespoke services

Luxury is even better when it’s bespoke. Offer your guests the option to avail themed city tours, services for their kids like day care, appointed nannies, etc. Furthermore, provide them with workstations, yoga and mindfulness sessions to calm their senses. Special day offers, discounts and services could also add to guest experience. Make the guest feel special, in all ways, all the time.

6. Indulgences

Indulge your guests with some bonding and fun activities. Organize culinary masterclasses, baking sessions. Arrange for picnics, breezy breakfasts, barbeque/themed lunches, candlelit dinners. Take your guests out for wine/ whiskey/ rum/ tea tasting and cocktail mixing sessions. Keep local delicacies in a basket and place it in rooms as a welcome gesture. Enrich guest experience through local cultural shows.

7. Upskill and update staff frequently

Staff behavior and attitude can break or make the deal for a hotel. They are the ones representing your brand to guests. They are the deciding factors for repeat business to a large extent. Infact, 89% of businesses compete through the quality of customer experience they’re able to provide. Therefore, the staff should be well updated with latest technologies and practices in the hospitality industry. Additionally, they should be well in sync with each other. Regular customer training programs, bonding exercises and skill updating sessions should be organized to ensure smooth services.

8. Reviews and feedbacks are crucial to growth

Reviews and feedbacks enable a hotel to better their services. According to a TripAdvisor report, 93% of people use online reviews while deciding which hotel to book. That’s not a proportion you would want to ignore. Therefore, you could politely ask guests for reviews or undertake creative practices to get some. For example, you can hand out complimentary keepsake postcards along with a request for guest review at the checkout or offer guests some discounts/offers for every review they submit.

Feedbacks are equally important to understand the effectiveness of your services and people. They are imperative to growth. With Heda, you can get instant feedbacks through post stay short, detailed and empathetic surveys.

You can refer to ‘Tools, Trends & Tips for Seamless Guest Experience' to know more about automating hotel services.

Invest in these ideas and practices, and always stead ahead in the game. Thriving in an industry so competitive and dynamic, is no cake walk. It requires thinking out of the box but at the same time, bettering the conventional through consistent efforts and employing new ideas. Create a brand image that is known for its exceptional services, warm and unforgettable hospitality, and loyal guests. All this through some very simple yet effective hotel guest engagement ideas, strategies and practices.