This is a guest blog post written by our partners at Cloudbeds.

Thanks to instant and personalized communication across platforms like Amazon and Uber, travelers now expect fast, seamless responses and the convenience of choosing how and when they communicate with hotels.

For hotel management, implementing personalized communication can feel complicated, especially when dealing with persistent labor shortages. Thankfully, with the help of technology, it’s possible to deliver tailored interactions throughout the guest journey without added pressure on staff.

In this article, we explore how hotels can leverage data from their property management system and other hotel technologies to implement personalized communication from discovery to post-stay.

Importance of personalized communication

Personalized communication brings a myriad of benefits for hotels, shaping the guest experience and impacting revenue. Here are just a few reasons why it’s so important.

Influences booking decisions

Personalized communication can start as soon as a potential guest finds you online. From showcasing specific amenities or promotions based on cart abandonment data to using chatbots to streamline the booking process, hotels can deliver targeted and meaningful interactions built to convert. The key here is collecting data and understanding your target segments to make your website as impactful as possible.

Higher satisfaction

Personalized touchpoints throughout the guest journey drive higher levels of engagement, leading to satisfaction and loyalty. Consider pre-arrival emails to establish trust, real-time messaging in-stay to enhance the experience, and follow-up communication with targeted promotions. All of these actions lead to more engagement with guests throughout their journey and provide an opportunity to form a long-lasting relationship.

Boosts total revenue

While guest satisfaction is priority number one, another great benefit of personalized communication is its impact on revenue. By offering room upgrades, dining packages, or tailored experiences for different segments, hotels can encourage guests to explore more of what the property has to offer, leading to increased spend.

Insights into preferences

The more data you collect about your guests, the better you’ll be able to refine your offerings in the future. By asking guests for information and analyzing data, you can understand what’s most important. Whether it’s late check-out, room upgrades, or opt-in housekeeping, finding what leads to higher satisfaction is crucial to building repeatable processes.

How PMS data can be used to personalize guest engagement

A hotel’s property management system (PMS) is the single source of truth for guest data. It can tell you everything you need to know about booking patterns and preferences, top channels, spending habits, and more. Learning how to effectively leverage this data is key to personalizing communication and delivering tailored experiences.

For the most accurate insights, hotels must ensure that their other tech systems, including customer relationship management (CRM) systems, booking engines, POS systems, revenue management systems, and more, are properly integrated with the PMS.

Together, these systems can deliver a unified view of the guest, taking into account booking details and stay history, guest profiles, communication preferences, and spending patterns. Based on these insights, hotels can then leverage guest engagement platforms to automate and personalize communication via email, SMS, Messenger, WhatsApp, and more.

Personalization throughout the guest journey

Incorporating personalization throughout every stage of the guest journey is crucial to establishing relationships and increasing revenue. Here, we break down how hotels can leverage PMS data to craft their communication strategy.

Discovery

Long before a guest arrives, hotels can implement targeted marketing campaigns that resonate with potential guests. By leveraging guest data stored in the CRM and PMS, hotels can create segmented lists to deliver personalized offers and promotions. For example, repeat guests might receive an exclusive email offer for a room upgrade, while families can be sent a package deal with kid-friendly activities.

Using technology with causal AI functionality can help hoteliers analyze patterns in guest data to understand the driving factors that influence why certain guests book and identify the most effective segments, channels, messages, upselling strategies, and timing to maximize conversions.

Pre-arrival

The pre-arrival phase is all about building excitement and setting expectations. Based on the information collected during the booking process, hotels can follow up with personalized communication that establishes trust and pushes upsell opportunities.

The confirmation email is one of the most important communication touchpoints. However, many hoteliers forget to go a step further and include personalization in this message. Here, you can include a link to your upsell marketplace where guests can pre-order a bottle of champagne upon arrival or secure a bike rental for the week. Just be sure that the offers you suggest are tailored to the guest segment.

In-stay

While on property, the focus shifts to delivering personalized experiences that exceed expectations. Prior to or upon arrival, ask guests what their preferred method of communication is – whether email, SMS, or WhatsApp – especially while traveling.

Integrated guest engagement platforms enable hotels to communicate with guests in real time during their stay, providing an easy way to ask questions or raise concerns. For example, if a guest needs extra towels, they can text the front desk, which can then trigger a workflow to housekeeping to have them delivered as soon as possible. The front desk staff can then leave a note for future stays to leave extra towels in the room. These interactions, while small, can have a significant impact on satisfaction.

Post-stay

Staying in contact with guests once they’ve left the property is crucial for gathering feedback and fostering loyalty. The first post-stay step that hotels should take is to send a personalized thank you email with a feedback link. Instead of asking generic survey questions, it should be personalized based on the guest’s stay. For example, if they used the spa, ask about their service, or if they dined in the restaurant, inquire about their meal. This information can then be stored for future stays and used to make improvements.

Additionally, hotels can leverage data to send personalized offers throughout the year. For example, birthday or anniversary promotions or a “It’s been a year since we’ve seen you – we miss you!” reminder email.

Personalization throughout the guest journey

The hardest step is knowing where to start. Here, we break down how hotels can get started with personalized communication.

1. Consolidate your data

Personalized guest communication is impossible without the right data. Start by ensuring that your technology systems are integrated with your PMS – eliminating duplicate datasets. Make
sure that you are collecting data from guests during the booking process – including their preferences (like room types), special requests, important dates (like birthdays or anniversaries), and any other information that can be used to personalize communication – and that it’s being stored in your PMS.

2. Segment your audience

Create guest profiles and groups based on behavior, preferences, or past experiences. For example, you can segment business travelers, families, first-time guests, and more. New technologies are emerging that do this process automatically, suggesting ultra-targeted segments (like solo travelers in their 20s who have visited your website in the past six months) that make marketing efforts even more impactful and effective.

3. Choose your channels

Based on your segments, determine what channels or combination of communication channels make the most sense. Using the right channel at the right time increases the likelihood of engagement. For example, backpackers may prefer to receive all communication via WhatsApp, while business travelers prefer email. Communication is of no use unless guests are actually receiving and engaging with the messages.

4. Identify key touchpoints and automation opportunities

As we explored, there are many ways that personalization can be incorporated into the guest journey. Start by identifying the key touchpoints where personalized communication will have the most impact.

One of the biggest advantages of PMS integration is the ability to automate communication. Hotels can use guest engagement tools to create automated workflows that leverage personalization tokens and data from the PMS, such as triggering confirmation emails and pre-arrival messages x number of days before check-in.

5. Monitor and optimize

Personalization is an ongoing effort that requires constant testing and iterations. Using business intelligence tools that consolidate data across platforms, hotels can track performance and identify areas for improvement. Look at satisfaction scores, guest feedback, conversion rates, and more to see if your efforts are working, and use this data to refine segmentation, messaging, and offers over time.

Incorporating personalized communication

Incorporating personalized communication into your hotel’s guest engagement strategy will help you deliver more meaningful experiences, foster loyalty, and improve your bottom line. By leveraging the power of PMS data and integrating the right technology, you’ll be well on your way to creating unforgettable guest journeys.

About Cloudbeds
Cloudbeds is the leading platform redefining the concept of PMS for the hospitality industry, serving tens of thousands of properties in more than 150 countries worldwide. Built from the ground up to be masterfully unified and scalable, the award-winning Cloudbeds Platform brings together built-in and integrated solutions that modernize hotel operations, distribution, guest experience, and data & analytics.