By Larry Mogelonsky, MBA, P. Eng. (www.hotelmogel.com)
The tumultuous period during and in the immediate aftermath
of COVID-19 lockdowns saw the rise of contactless technologies to meet the new
mandate for viral safety as well as the search for staycation or drive-to
customers using a myriad of digital channel strategies. Now that we are
approaching the end of peak season summer travel, and much of the ‘revenge
travel’ cohort have come and gone, it is time to look ahead for how to keep the
lights on throughout the often-slower autumn months.
Besides continuing to make up for lost revenue during the
quarantine period in spring, hotels will need an aggressive strategy in place
for drumming up additional leisure business for the tail end of 2020 because
corporate and group guests are still returning at a turtle’s pace; these
segments cannot be relied upon to deliver healthy numbers until 2021. And for
achieving the most conversion from transient lookers, the first step is to
analyze your customer relationship management software (CRM) to see what you
can learn from recent guest behavior.
For starters, your CRM simply must be integrated with as
many touchpoints in the hotel tech stack as possible – the more links it has,
the more insights you have, especially because traveler behavior is quite unique
during these strange times. A fortuitous side effect of Covid, though, has been
that all the investments in touchless technologies have now allowed hotels to
digitalize supplementary or granular guest behaviors and preferences that were
previously handled in-person by your staff.
For instance, a robust hospitality CRM should have enough
multi-channel flexibility to incorporate all the various questions asked and
requests put through on a guest messaging app as well as note all the types of
transactions processed via contactless payment gateways. What people are
buying, what they are asking about (especially nowadays with regard to new
sanitization and physical distancing measures) and what additional services
they are demanding can all be used to formulate enticing fall packages beyond
geographic and demographic targeting.
What are the top five questions asked by guests before they
arrive? Similarly, what are the top five posed once those customers are onsite?
What are the top five on-property requests? By having this kind of data at your
disposal, perhaps you can anticipate these service needs in advance of any
inquiries to augment the hotel experience.
Where I see your CRM truly coming to the rescue this autumn
is in maximizing return visits from leisure guests. This is particularly
important if we are heading into a widespread second wave or another stock
market crash which may both scare off a lot of new vacationers who are
unfamiliar with your brand as well as further shorten the average look-to-book
(L2B) window.
Suppose you want to run a promotion aimed at your loyalty
base, to run from early October through to the holiday season. Knowing that
this is an off-peak period and that Covid is still heavily influencing travel
purchasing decisions, an easy assumption is that most of your customers will
come from nearby, rubber tire territories and that the L2B ratio may be quite
abrupt as many choose to wait until the last minute due to the ever-changing
media coverage of Covid numbers.
What can your CRM teach you about room preferences, most
popular F&B, amenity purchases or ancillary service requests to help shape
this promotion? What, if anything, can be observed about actions on your part
that increased the L2B ratio to thereby help plan staffing or rate strategy as
far ahead as possible? Perhaps you are finally reopening your spa, but which of
your customers would actually care about this piece of news? Can your CRM data
from recent months help you to develop more effective dynamic pricing of your
rooms inventory?
Aside from giving you more information to craft the perfect
fall package, another Covid-specific challenge where a CRM can be of assistance
relates to the general satiety of eblasts, newsletters, webinars and all other
forms of one-to-many marketing. With the death of physical media and the rise
of the stay-at-home workforce, all of us – hoteliers and hotel customers – have
now become inundated with these kinds of digital advertisements over the past
six months, so much so that most of them have been rendered as ineffective
white noise.
Putting yourself in a prospective guest’s shoes, what if you
received a short, personalized email from a hotel manager first acknowledging
your recent stay and what you did while on property, then offering you a great
package that’s value-added with services based upon your specific purchasing
history? In this manner, if you have rich guest profiles within your CRM, then
you are enabling your managers to utilize one-to-one marketing in a world that
is numb to blanket eblasts.
The final point to highlight concerns reputation management
whereby a CRM that also folds in guests’ social media handles can afford your
property with a comprehensive perspective on any perceived errors or negative
criticisms. Like everything else, Covid has altered guest behavior and many are
now exceedingly sensitive to mistakes made by your teams.
Realistically, we all know that there’s only so much you can
‘gild a lily’, meaning that if your hotel doesn’t live up to expectations it
will be incrementally harder to get guests to come back during a less desirable
time of year. Thus, reputation management is first and foremost an end-to-end
feedback loop to guide product improvements. The problem is that what past
guests cite as the causes of their chagrin may not give the full picture as to
the true culprits. But if you can forensically connect all the dots of the
total customer journey via a CRM then you stand a far better at addressing the
core of any errors.
Given all the previously mentioned factors affecting travel
as well as several others such as the persisting lack of international flight
availability, this autumn will prove to be quite problematic for hotels that
aren’t listening to what key drivers are actually motivating guests to book.
You need all resources on hand to get those quick wins in the leisure segment
that will save your property from dreadful occupancies during this upcoming low
period and taking full advantage of your CRM is an important preliminary step.
About Larry Mogelsonsky
Larry Mogelonsky
One of the world’s most published writers in hospitality, Larry Mogelonsky
is the principal of Hotel
Mogel Consulting Limited, a Toronto-based consulting practice. His
experience encompasses hotel properties around the world, both branded and independent,
and ranging from luxury and boutique to select-service. Larry is also on
several boards for companies focused on hotel technology. His work includes
five books “Are You an Ostrich or a Llama?” (2012), “Llamas Rule” (2013),
“Hotel Llama” (2015), “The Llama is Inn” (2017) and “The Hotel Mogel” (2018).
You can reach Larry at larry@hotelmogel.com to discuss hotel business
challenges or to book speaking engagements.
Media Contact:
Larry Mogelonsky
Email: larry@hotelmogel.com
Website: http://hotelmogel.com/
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