How to Use Guest Data to Improve Hotel Sales & Revenue

Hotel guest data simply means the information a hotel collects from a guest at all the guest touchpoints, pre, during, and post-stay. This data includes guest tastes and preferences, patterns, traveling habits, type, behavior, and personal information such as identity and contact details, etc.  

This data is further to make crucial operational, creative, and revenue decisions and to improve hotel bookings, sales, and numbers.  

Why is Guest Data Important?

Hotel is a customer-centric business. Guests are the driving force for this business. And hence, identifying and learning about guest psychology, patterns, likes, and dislikes, is of utmost importance for hotels to derive their marketing, sale, and pricing strategies.  

Guest data is critical to driving revenue and profits. It further helps a hotel to run personalized marketing campaigns, reaching the right people and hitting the right cords. Additionally, guest data allows a hotel to offer the guest a customized journey, and thus improve hotel bookings and revenue.  

Categorizing the guests into different groups based on shared characteristics and habits that are identified through customer data, is crucial for effective hotel market segmentation, which further enhances the returns on marketing efforts and facilitates return business. Thus, hotels can improve hotel sales using guest data.

Guest data facilitates the most fruitful hotel-guest interactions. 

Types of Hotel Guest Data to be Collected

This section gives lists the types of guest data that a hotel should collect in order to improve hotel revenue.  

1. Contact Details

Contact information of a guest such as email address and phone number, is important data for a hotel. It helps a hotel stay connected with a guest pre- and post-stay. A hotel maintains regular communication with the guest and informs him/her about the marketing campaigns that might interest them. This helps in initiating repeat business and sometimes even encourages the guest to do direct bookings instead of using an OTA.  

Contact details thus work as useful hotel guest data to improve sales.  

2. Demographics 

Identifying and understanding your guest’s demographics such as gender, age, work, etc., can help a hotel curate special packages and deals for them. Moreover, this data helps a hotel create more targeted marketing campaigns and services for the guest’s specific needs and preferences.  

This information plays a major role to improve hotel bookings, sales using guest data. 

3. Tastes and Preferences 

Learning and recording guest tastes and preferences help hotels to serve them better. It allows hotels to offer a more personalized experience and please the guest. This data allows a hotel to make a guest feel at home and even upsell or offer complimentary amenities as per the guest's preferences, thereby increasing repeat business.  

Moreover, a hotel can also identify the guest’s preferred communication channel for marketing campaigns and other types of communication. This information helps a hotel to better its marketing efforts and booking processes.  

4. Purpose of Travel 

Having knowledge about the purpose of traveling a guest helps the hotel to serve them exactly what they want. This data helps a hotel create guest profiles and do advanced segmentation based on travel purposes and requirements. Hotels can then offer packages, offers, deals, and even services according to what the guest seeks.

The services, and amenities offered to a leisure guest might differ from that of a business traveler, to make their travel more convenient. Thus, this data helps a hotel to target the needs of each traveler better.  

The hotel guest data can be collected either through: 

• Direct collection ways such as forms, surveys, and other feedback mechanisms or,  
• Indirect collection using technology such as tracking guest activity using key cards or tracking their behavior on social media or,  
• Third-party collection sources such as travel agencies or booking platforms 

How can a Hotel Leverage Guest Data

Collecting and storing guest data might seem like a hassle at first, but it is what helps a hotel cater to the needs of its guest to the tee and stand out from its competitors. Humans appreciate care and attention to detail. Similarly, a hotel knowing its guests makes a guest feel seen and special.  

Let’s look at the areas a hotel can target using guest data to improve hotel bookings and revenue:  

1. Personalized Experience and Marketing  

Knowing the guest helps a hotel offer more personalized services pre- and during the stay and communicate targeted marketing campaigns post-stay. This creates a pleasant and relevant present and future staying environment for the guest, which converts even a first-time guest into a long-term, loyal one.  

Furthermore, targeted communication helps a hotel attract the right type of guests through a particular service, amenity, or marketing effort. And luring the right category or type of guests helps a hotel boost present as well as future sales and revenue.  

2. Targeted Upselling and Cross-selling 

Guest data helps a hotel practice two of its crucial revenue-generating marketing and pricing strategies, upselling and cross-selling. By studying the customer data, a hotel offers guests tailored upgrades, services, amenities, and experiences.  

Some of the most fruitful upsells such as early check-in/out, room upgrades, airport transfer services, additional amenities, etc, can help a hotel enhance guest satisfaction, boost bookings, and ultimately, revenue. But only in case when the hotel is able to match the right upsell offer with the right guest, is the one most likely to buy it. And this is only possible through hotel guest data.  

Similarly, a hotel can even offer additional services such as spa treatments and meal options to guests who enjoy them, leveraging historical and preferences data.  

3. Inventory Management 

Guest data helps a hotel rank its services and amenities and market them accordingly. In simpler terms, hotels can identify the most popular and the most non-popular services and amenities amongst the guests and allocate the resources.  

By collecting and studying guest data, hotels tend to gain insights into which amenities are in high demand and optimize their inventory management accordingly. Similarly, guest data can be used to determine which services or products generate the most revenue, and inventory levels are then adjusted accordingly. 

Moreover, the amenities and services that are not doing that great amongst the guests can be put at the bottom of the list of priorities or eliminated in order to save costs. By integrating revenue management software, hotels refine this process further, dynamically adjusting pricing and inventory levels based on guest preferences, ultimately maximizing sales and revenue while optimizing costs.

4. Pricing Strategies 

Understanding demand patterns and seasons, could really a hotel decide on the most optimal pricing strategies for maximum revenue. This data is crucial for dynamic pricing that majorly depends upon demand. It helps a hotel charge a price that’s not too high to discourage guests and not too low to create losses.  

Customer data also helps with revenue management by optimal allocation of revenue for the most sought-after rooms, services, and amenities. Ulitmately, hotels can improve hotel sales using guest data.

5. Loyalty programs and Subscription models  

Through personalized rewards and perks based on guest data, a hotel can enhance guest satisfaction and loyalty. customer data facilitates guest segmentation and allows hotels to offer loyalty programs to their most loyal guests. Furthermore, based on the same data, loyalty tiers are created, such as bronze, silver, and gold, to offer the most suitable perks and privileges to the guests based on their previous stays and indulgences.  

Moreover, the same guest data and advanced segmentation would help a hotel curate a subscription model for different types of guests. These models can be created for frequent leisure travelers, digital nomads, business/ corporate travelers, etc.  

6. Customer Service Improvements 

Collection and analysis of hotel guest data, such as feedback from, surveys and online reviews, hotels gain valuable insights into what guests are enjoying at their property and value the most. Moreover, it helps a hotel with online reputation management.  

The service that needs improvement could then be improved, the one that needs to be added could be added and lastly, the one that needs to be taken out of the list could be struck out.  

Additionally, data can be used to identify departments/areas where reviews are consistently bad and customer service may need improvement.  

Conclusion

While these were all the areas that could be improved using customer data, hotels could reap benefits that are far deeper and nuanced than this by knowing their guests.  

Knowing your guests is equivalent to knowing your craft; only when you know enough, you would be able to offer enough and serve the best.  

How can BOTSHOT Help?

BOTSHOT through its hotel automation solutions aims to help hotels become and stay a lively place whilst every guest enjoys thoroughly and has the most pleasant stay experience.  

We help hotels market their campaigns in the most effective manner while ensuring effective revenue management and pricing strategies. And this is only possible through efficiently capturing the guest data and sentiments 

BOTSHOT Offers: 

• Its contactless check-in solution, eFront Desk captures guest demographics and helps a hotel know the basics for marketing campaigns 
• Another product that collects guest data and stores it in an organized manner is our feedback management system, Heda. This product helps a hotel know how a guest feels during and post-stay in order to take necessary steps to enhance guest satisfaction, at the right time.  
• Lastly, our AI-conversational chatbot, Freddie, stays with the guest 24*7. Well, not literally! Freddie offers multi-lingual support to guests and solves their queries instantly. It stores these queries and responses and helps a hotel identify guest tastes and preferences.

Know your guests today! Get in touch with us now!