Over the last years, there has been a huge changes regarding the guest experience, the use of guest data and hotel operations. Hotels are becoming braver at adopting technology to support their guests, that is why staying updated about the newest trends is a must for every hotelier. 

Next, the main questions answered by experts regarding the use of guest data to improve the guest experience and operations.

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How can a hotel choose on which technology to prioritize and invest in?

Hotels still offer local check-in and check-out very few hotels off the tools that boost offers around guest engagement prior to arrival. Mobile check-in for hotels that guests can do themselves from their phones prior to arrival can save a lot of time from waiting in queues and filling in forms manually. 

Small changes like this can take away the long administrative process and automate the process, it reduces costs and generates more revenue. Another thing would be being on the cloud can make application transitions and trails a lot easier, guests are really looking forward to having a good personalized experience.

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What are the latest changes and trends regarding bookings?

The confidence is growing, the hoteliers are optimistic when their guests are optimistic. It is visible from the booking behavior from the Hotel Booking Trends data, which was released in February, we can see that the global average of bookings has now reached 106% of 2019, that's booking volume compared to the booking volumes of pre-COVID levels. So that indicates growth since pre-Covid, which is very positive.

We also see that the average cost of a hotel room has grown, if you look at it globally from $143 USD in 2021 to $177 USD last year, that’s about 20% above the 2019 average. Interestingly, July was the most profitable month for most of the Northern Hemisphere properties, and December for the Southern Hemisphere, but you can also see it on other key metrics. The booking window, the lead time to booking is widening we're now roughly 30 days which was 10 days more than last year. In 2019, it was 36 days, but we can see it is going in that direction. Another positive trend was that cancellations are globally down to roughly 20%, that’s 5% less than last year and way down 32% from 2020. So, you can see that confidence is coming back.

Finally the optimism by travelers themselves, there is such a strong urge to travel despite the threats from inflation and global crisis. People want to get out for their physical well-being. In another study, 3000 travelers were asked about their travel preferences and what are they planning to do. They answered if they have a pre-planned trip 90% are happier and look forward to the future more than if they are not. It’s extremely important for their mental health. There's a strong sense of optimism and the market seems very positive.

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What are the main concerns for hotels and how are they dealing with these challenges? 

We're seeing the same occupancies, we're seeing significantly higher rates, but we're also seeing across our focus as it came out, you have all the abilities as PMS in the database and we see that the same hotels have around 30% less staff, which is terrifying if you think that they're serving the same number of guests paying more for the service.

But you give them less service and then that trickles down to the reviews and everything, and specifically seeing is impacting the three-star segments where these customers are just not happy with what they're getting out of their spending on the room, for example.

When we went into Covid, everyone thought no one is going to buy software and just be in survival mode but after a few months when hotels were completely empty, everyone thought it was the time to think about innovative things that are ready for the future. There just isn't enough labor to support these hotels to figure out where is your highest labor costs and then look at what are the apps that can really help you to supply or basically help innovate and automate some of those labor work, and there's a really great solution out there.

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Is it costly for hoteliers to invest in technology?

There's still a lack of innovation. It's because hoteliers are buying something in the cloud, and they don’t test it properly. You should start to test it. It's exciting, it doesn't cost much to switch on something. Just don't switch off everything at the same time, because then you get loaded with the cost.  Figure out what's the thing that you need at your hotel, and then you just get there through trial and error. It needs a long-term vision to achieve goals. It's not well, just taking a little bit of technology in isolation.

Everything starts with a financial plan and understanding how yours compares to someone else in the destination that you look up to and make a great plan. It starts with finances and understanding your revenues on sending your costs, and then you can very quickly see where the biggest opportunity is and then you start getting that area and basically start mapping them out. With no effort, they have the most impact and it does take a few hours for you to sit down, but it's totally worth doing that exercise. It's very incremental, put something out that you are not sure will work, and the cost is small to replace or change it down the road again.

The same concept you can apply in the hotel starts with the finance plan, that's an important part but within that, for instance, personalisation, probably along the line if the goal of the hotel is to improve guest service and reduce labour costs, then that could have two goals and with that, you can find easily a simple solution that can either help with more revenue or reduce your cost if you simply take what other labor steps I need to take to check in against or to clean the room and which ones of those could I automate or remove and then when you find when you basically map out those little steps you can look for solutions that can help with those things. 

A simple way of approaching it and then keeping your end goal of better guest service or shortage of labor, you know, in place and then you get to where you want. It's interesting that sort of the crisis that forced this acceptance within the hotel industry, technology can actually solve these problems, into more efficient operation.

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Where could be the most impactful deployment of the technology for a hotel? 

Use technology to empower people rather than replacing them. It's like working smarter instead of harder. In general time intensive, repetitive and low-value-added tasks should be replaced by technology that could be, for example, booking adjustments, pre-arrival communication, responding to FAQs and so on.

Implementing technology to support and empower your organization, will free up time that could be better used in other situations and areas. How do you do it? Unlock the power of simplicity. Always think about what it would be like to achieve and closely integrate the guest perspective into it. Make it easy to be a guest, but also make it easy to be an employee. Start one step at a time and improvements will start to show.

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How has interconnectivity between different applications improved the ability for hotels to innovate, and adopt new systems?

It's transformative and its seen in hotels, an average hotel has five or six integrations running. But the ones that are outperforming are looking at 12 to 15 integrations that they have run across their business to automate some of these repetitive tasks. For example, TikTok and Instagram their purpose is to lock you in on the app and have you never have to leave that application, whereas it should be the purpose to make sure that hotel users aren't using our systems as little as possible so that they get to spend time with the guests instead.

Start measuring how many, how much time users spend on your system so that you can improve on some of those golden tasks that are in the system. Some of the best impacts that hotels see have lots of integrations because integrations have sent data up and down. It eliminates the need to go and verify two systems, whether the housing has correctly uploaded the right room numbers to be cleaned and whether the guest is checked out of that room at that time, and that's where two-way API is needed.

Find the open API of the PMS and read it, you don't have to be a developer to understand what you can do with it. The use case is written into these API optimizations. It's interesting because you can see what kind of data the PMS could send out to systems or get pulled in and if you start to invest in that then start with reading the API some of the best hoteliers are using API in their regular language has to be something that hoteliers should start learning because it's the tools unlocking some of the power of integrations.

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Why is an open API PMS important for hotels?

Hotels need to make sure they're on a PMS that enables them to innovate and move forward, i-e, a cloud PMS with an open API structure, as most of them still don't have that yet. Once that is in place, build simple things like attribute selling because you have access to the details of that PMS, and build APIs to connect, to find particular data. Use those APIs to get all the data that is needed from the PMS then do some algorithm works so that invent everything needed to sell an attribute at the right price and make sure that it's linked to one or two specific rooms. Assign that room automatically all those things can be done today with those new APIs. Newer PMS and newer foundations enable the third party to develop on top of that and provide solutions to the benefit of hoteliers.

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Why is attribute selling an important thing for personalisation and guest experience? 

It allows the guest to purchase what they want rather than implying that the guest would like a junior suite which he or she does not know what it is. The guests can buy a balcony, a jacuzzi or a room on a high floor. Each of those at different prices gets there for the exact room that they want without having to physically pick a room number, which they don't know. Attribute selling really helps the guests to pick exactly what they want. With the technology available in newer PMS, we can then ensure that guests get that exact room when they check in automatically. That's attributes-based selling, one of the areas where innovation is happening.

What are hoteliers struggling with to provide a seamless guest experience, and how can they create the best experience before the guests arrive and after they arrive?

The short and sweet answer is data. Hoteliers are struggling from the lack of data overview, they have the data is spread out in different systems, not interfacing with each other and without the ability to access accurate data.

This does not allow you to use it in the most opportune way and that results in that you won't be able to deliver a superior guest experience, so it all comes down to understanding the data and also being able to use it. Without one source of truth where you have access to the data where each guest profile is merged and reached, handled and matched and so on. You won't be able to fully customize and fully personalize your communication.

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What can hotels do to start working on their guest experience?

Small components and incremental improvements. Focusing primarily on any data between post-booking and prior to arrival and that's where the highest opportunity for upsell lies. We collect a persona component from the guest, which is very difficult because in many cases it comes just from Expedia or booking.com and it's very hard to find anything even then you can find certain components.

We collect that and then we try to derive some algorithms to look at that we also look at data from the hotel itself. Not only at the room available, but also do we think the room will be clean and ready to go to offer early arrival so that people don't get disappointed when arrive at the front desk to get the early arrival. So, we really try to find as much data as we can to optimize and automate the decision process.

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How will the guest experience change over the next few years?

Building an outstanding guest journey starts with the ability to personalize. Personalization comes hand in hand with segmentation to be able to communicate different messages at different times to different guests via different channels. There are different ways of doing that, but you must make it easy, you must make it easy to be a guest by providing an effortless but still interactive guest experience.

You can do that of course in different ways, but you should think that each touch point in the guest journey must be meaningful, relevant and add value to each guest every time and always when you manage that you have already come far. Everything we do should start from the guest's perspective, if it doesn't impact the guest's journey in a positive way, don't waste your time doing it. Closely integrate the guests in the guest journey and the guest experience you will profit from it.

From a guest perspective that will be looked upon as superior service, but from an operational perspective, you basically take back control and what you do with that, that's up to you, depending on what you like to achieve, you can create operational efficiency, you can convert into new revenue streams. For example, upselling and cross-sell and so on, that's up to you as a hotelier, but you need to start with shaping the guest experience and improving the guest journey.

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How AI is going to change the way that hotels operate and where is it going to have the biggest impact?

“Big impact on the way that we communicate with guests through messaging apps, for example, with all the frequently asked questions, how do you improve that because it is still not always a great experience that you get when you talk to a chatbot that's definitely one of the areas that the biggest improvement is going to be.”

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Are hoteliers ready and confident enough to trust and work hand in hand with Artificial Intelligence? 

The industry is built for people with the foundation of connecting people. There is resistance that you lose control of but on the other hand, many hoteliers when they embrace or just try it out, have a positive experience it's not right to say yes or no. Innovation happens for a reason.

We have a responsibility being a tech provider, we have a responsibility also to lower the thresholds to get started and there are, of course, many things we can do to speed up that process.

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What is the hottest thing that is going to happen in 2024?

Automation is on the rise, global travel is coming back, and business travel is bouncing back, this will open a myriad of opportunities. With AI just at the beginning, nobody really knows where this is going to take us.

Keeping an open mind and just starting to experiment around with any of the tools really is going to start to set hopefully up for success. Creating and nurturing a mindset that allows us to take on technology. Companies will start seeing part of the booking acquisition process because it's really adding to the way guests can book what they really want rather than guess what they would like.

The change in the infrastructure, but this is the biggest pain of the PMS, getting the digital door lock is the biggest hurdle.

Learn more: 

All these insights are extracted from the webinar “Learnings from ITB: What is new in guest experience & operations for 2023?”. You can watch the full recording here.

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