With the rise of social media, the way to communicate and engage with guests, particularly with millennials has been changed radically. 

Traditional communication channels such as phones and emails do not do the trick anymore. People are communicating with each other through social media apps such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, SMS… The Global Digital Report shows that there are 3.484 billion social media users worldwide in 2019 with a 9% year-on-year increase, while the number of mobile phone users is 5.112 billion. Among the social media messaging apps, the most popular ones are Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Wechat.

The use of phones and emails are simply falling:

• Millennials prefer texting than calling because they feel calling is intrusive
• Significant increase in communicating through instant messaging (IM) apps
• People are suffering from email overload
• People need to spend 28% of work time to manage emails but only 38% emails are important and relevant (McKinsey).
• Email amount sent and received daily grew from 205 billion in 2015 to 246 million in 2019 (Radicati’s Email Report).
• More email users and overall sends indicate more email overload in upcoming years.

On the contrary, people are highly engaged with social media:

• 42% of the world’s current population are using social media, 2.36 hours on average are spent day/person on social networks and messaging (Globalwebindex, 2018) 
• Your potential customers are using social media. 54% of social users utilize social media to research products (Lyfemarketing, 2018)
• 71% of consumers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are willing to recommend the brand to others (Lyfemarketing, 2018)

Facing the fall of traditional communication channels, guest engagement will undoubtedly be influenced. Hotels need to find new ways to talk with guests and engage with them. A Web Messaging integrating with the most popular social messaging apps will do the job.