How to Build a Guest-Centric Hotel

This is an excerpt of the article as featured on Skift. CLICK HERE to download the full article. 

Hoteliers: It’s not about you.

Is your marketing all about you? About how beautiful are your rooms, how delicious is the restaurant’s menu, how soothing are the spa services? All this may be true, but let’s be realistic: Your potential guests are hearing the same thing from every hotel.

There definitely is room for differentiation among hotel properties, and travel searchers yearn for it. Leisure and business travelers alike are usually undecided when they begin the online research process. Sixty five percent of vacationers and sixty percent of road warriors are considering multiple hotel brands when they begin planning. While most business travelers have a handle on the differences between hotel brands, 65 percent of leisure travelers are unclear on hotel differentiation.

Nevertheless, in a world where every hotel marketing campaign tells the same story, rising above the chorus takes a new strategy. We call it becoming guest-centric. It’s a turnabout in approach: Instead of trying to get customers to buy what the company has, customer-centric companies create products and services that customers want.

Bob Thompson, author of Hooked on Customers, writes that there are four stages companies go through on the way to becoming truly customer-centric:

1. CRM: a focus on extracting more value from existing customers

2. Responsive: actively working to gather and respond to customer feedback about products and services

3. Engaged: focused on maintaining long-term relationships by providing delightful experiences

4. Inspired: A deep understanding of customers’ needs, wants and desires drives the creation of products and services

To keep up with the expectations of the modern traveler, hoteliers need a better approach to collecting and analyzing information on their guests. Then, they need to use that information to deliver inspired marketing campaigns that are targeted and relevant to the wants and needs of today’s hotel guests.

As featured on Skift, this article discusses ways hoteliers can break through the noise of generic hotel marketing and deliver a truly guest-centric hotel experience.

CLICK HERE to download the full article.