What makes for memorable guest experiences?
The hotel guest experience starts long before anyone sets a foot through your door. That’s because today’s customers are also avid researchers. They scour reviews, compare deals on a multitude of third-party sites, and get to know every inch of your facilities in relation to those of your competitors.
What’s more, the guest experience ends long after their stay, with reviews and feedback leaving a huge mark on other would-be travellers.
And all of that means one really important thing: the guest experience is about much more than a comfy bed and a tasty breakfast—it’s the outcome of dozens of touchpoints and moments spanning a bunch of different phases along every guest’s journey.
So building a best-in-class guest experience means owning every one of those touchpoints, not just the moments when a guest is on property.
By and large, that means working on a few key tenets:
Closing the gap between digital and physical
Friction that starts digitally follows guests through the door. A broken promo code, a confusing booking flow, or an unanswered pre-arrival message aren't just digital problems—they walk into your lobby, shape how guests interact with your team, and become the complaints your frontline can't fix. This means closing the gap between digital and physical is crucial.
Empowering your front line
Your frontline staff are your most important experience lever and your most overlooked intelligence source. But high turnover, inconsistent training, and scattered feedback make it hard to deliver the consistent, personalised service that defines exceptional hospitality. So giving the people delivering the experience every day a voice, and the right tools, can help you move from reactive to proactive.
Resolving problems before they define the stay
Guests expect things to go smoothly. When problems are resolved quickly and personally often end up being more loyal than guests who never had a problem at all. So the difference between a one-star review and a lifelong customer could come down to how—and how fast—a member of your team responded during a problem. In other words? Service recovery speed is a loyalty multiplier.
Improve guest experience at every location with guest experience software
Why enhancing the hospitality guest experience matters
Your digital reputation is your new front door. Online reviews and guest feedback are all-important, with the power to attract swathes of satisfied guests or turn the masses away. That means being able to control your reputation is paramount.
Importantly, this is no longer a marketing afterthought. Championing strong reviews, responding quickly—and personally—to negative ones, and doing whatever you can to proactively compound guest satisfaction are now all core parts of any hotel’s day-to-day operations.
6 ways hotels can enhance the guest experience
Looking to build exceptional guest experience and exceed guest expectations? Here’s how putting guest data to work, minimising pain points, and unifying your online and offline presence can really help foster repeat visits.
1. Work on the pre-check-in process
By the time guests make it to your front door they’ve already had a wealth of important interactions with your hotel. These are easy to miss without the right tools, though—and letting issues go unchecked will mean guests are upset long before they’ve even made it to their room.
The onus is on you to catch and quell that friction in the moment. Today’s digital experience management solutions can help you do this at scale, with tools designed to help you intercept abandoned online bookings, find (and fix) broken user flows, and even offer automated promos tailored to each customer.
If, for example, a guest has trouble making it through to booking using your online tools, technology like session replay, heatmaps, funnel analytics and guest journey tracking can help pinpoint where things are going wrong. With the right processes in place, you can smooth over these potential pitfalls before they become missed bookings.
2. Unify your signals
Your guests are talking about you. Are you listening? Calls, emails, and instant messages coming into the contact centre are one thing, but reviews on third-party sites (like TripAdvisor and Google Reviews), survey responses, and social media posts are entirely another. What’s key is that you can bring all these signals together.
Doing so will help you find emergent trends that more scattershot listening might miss, and that will help you see the guest experience with a more holistic eye.
This goes for the ways guests can interact with your services, too. The headspace to enter here is ‘phygital’, where the in-person and digital experiences are afforded equal weighting, allowing guests to move seamlessly between your physical and digital properties—from online research and booking to the stay experience—seamlessly.
3. Respond with empathy to make guests feel valued
Any unanswered complaint is a missed opportunity to turn a disgruntled guest into an advocate. And any review denoting a positive guest experience that you don’t thank is a lost chance to show that you’re listening. These responses are golden opportunities to both salvage negative guest experience and broadcast your responsiveness.
But managing this at scale can be tricky. Software suites that use natural language processing to glean the meaning from each message—and automate responses—can help you be everywhere your guests are without sacrificing brand voice or personalisation. The best tools can respond instantly, and flag priority cases to the relevant team members to handle.
Lastly, don’t forget to publish authentic guest reviews on your own channels. Posting these positive guest experiences can help you reduce reliance on third-party aggregators while also building your authenticity.
4. Turn guest engagement into insight
What’s a more useful piece of information: a 2-star score, or an in-depth critique of your room service menu? Guest ratings and scores are blunt instruments without the context behind them, so it’s important to be able to give managers and frontline teams actionable insights instead of raw data or summary reports that lack context.
Omnichannel experience management solutions that use automated text analysis to pull emotion, effort and sentiment from guest feedback—across every touchpoint—can help you turn all these data points into insights you can actually use. If a guest posts on social media that spa treatments were difficult to book, or leaves a review citing that they'd have liked some more information on local attractions, you’ll want that info flagged as important signals amid the noise so that you can take steps to improve.
Put simply: knowing you have a 3.9 satisfaction score is not the same as knowing what's dragging it down and what to do about it.
5. Empower your people
We’ve talked about being able to sift through reams of guest feedback and finding valuable insights. An equally important part of the puzzle is being able to deliver these insights to the people who can action meaningful change: your frontline teams.
Empowering people on-property with the right tools can help keep them informed of what needs tweaking and what’s working well across the guest experience, in the moment, instead of delivering second-hand insights from delayed reports.
But this goes two ways: give your frontline teams—the people closest to the guest experience—a voice, and they’ll often be able to tell you what's broken first. If you can effectively capture and act on hotel staff observations, you’ll be able to close the loop between employee experience and guest outcomes faster.
6. Reward guest loyalty
If you really want to foster repeat bookings, it pays to reward guests in ways that matter to them. A guest loyalty programme is a great start, since it can help you build a strong picture of guest preferences as you develop a relationship with them.
You might, for example, be able to piece together that a specific guest likes to travel on their birthday. Delivering them a bespoke offer before they even start searching can help make the decision a no-brainer.
But you can also offer personalised promos and discounts on a more ad hoc basis. Offering on the spot guest room upgrades, spa treatments, or room service can be a great way to deliver memorable experiences—and turn a one-time guest into a lifelong advocate.
Enhance guest experience with the right technology
Every hotel guest represents a chance to further cement your position as a leader in the hospitality industry—but only if you have the right tools in place for the job.
In today’s hotel environment, that means deploying guest experience management software imbued with AI and natural language processing built to understand every guest journey, build on guest satisfaction, and unite disparate sources of data across touchpoints.
With Qualtrics®, you’ll surface pain points and pinpoint trends before they have a chance to escalate—and guide teams to take actions that count.
Our platform enables next-level guest experience management that drives long-term loyalty, happy guests, and memorable stays.
