Delivering a great guest experience is key to impressing your guests, ensuring repeat bookings and maintaining your revenue. Guests satisfaction in the hotel business is crucial; happy clients are likely to visit again and recommend the hotel to others. Recommendations help hoteliers to broaden their audience without investing in any promotional activity. This can sometimes result in businesses struggling to provide experiences, rather than services.
Recognising the importance of guest satisfaction, it’s important that you actively work to improve the guest experience at your property. These tips will help you provide every single guest who stays at your hotel with an amazing and memorable experience:
#1 The guest experience begins long before they arrive
Great customer service starts before your guest arrives onsite. You should create a mobile-friendly website and a user-friendly mobile application that offers visual appeal and social proof of the experience that they will enjoy at your hotel. When a traveller connects with your brand online, they will immediately develop an opinion of your brand that will impact the ultimate experience that they have at your hotel.
After guest reserves their stay, send a follow-up email to find out if there’s anything they need. Whether it’s a dinner reservation or a cot in the room, let guests know you want their stay at your small hotel to be perfect and you’ll do everything in your power to help them. Then follow-through on these requests. If guests start with a great impression it’s more likely they’ll maintain it throughout the time they spend at your property.
#2 Respond the guest feedback
When you send out automated emails and push notifications with guest satisfaction surveys, you are proving to your guests that you want more information about their stay and that you strive to exceed expectations at every turn. You should give feedback to guests for each of them. By the way, your online reviews are very important. You should check all reviews daily and you show other travellers that you value the opinion of your guests and that you are willing to go the extra mile to deliver superior customer service.
#3 Connect with your guests on a personal level
Connect with your guests on a personal level. This also begins before your guests arrive at the front desk. You can use social media to reach out to your guests before their stay, and learn a little bit more about them. Customized booking forms also help you gain insight about the people who will be staying at your hotel. While your guests are staying with you, be sure to add small touches and details that personalize the experience. Guests will remember those experiences for years to come, and they will significantly improve their overall opinion of your property.
#4 Offer the technology they want
Guests expect free wi-fi in airports, cafes, and hotels. If your small hotel is still charging a wifi fee, it can sour the guest experience. It doesn’t cost a lot to offer free wifi to your guests, and the payoff is huge. If you already offer wifi, take it one step further with streaming media services and mobile application in every room. By designing a mobile app specifically for your property, you allow guests to control and customize their own experience. Mobile apps can provide local guides to the area, the ability to order room service or the ability to communicate with hotel staff.
#5 Use guest feedback to make future decisions and train the staff
Use guest feedback and relevant data to guide future decisions at your property. When you monitor your guest feedback and respond to it accordingly, you must take note of what improvements you could make in the future based on those responses. You also can use booking data and marketing data to finalize decisions for upgrading amenities, creating events, designing promotions and more. Not only will this help you make the best decisions and use your resources wisely, but it will show your past, present and future guests that you genuinely value their input.
Hospitality is a customer service industry, so every interaction a guest has with your employees contribute to their overall impression. When you teach staff to anticipate problems and read a guest’s body language, they can provide superior service. Train staff to assess a guest’s mood and interests by reading their clothing, facial expressions, and body language. They might direct a guest who looks tired toward your coffee station or ask a guest wearing a team jersey if they’re interested in attending a sports game. Your guests will love the personal touch.
Mehtap Topcu
Customer Success Program Manager
