VILAMOURA, Portugal — Innovation, choice, and thinking outside the box can help hotels maximise revenue and guest satisfaction, said Doug Lansky during his keynote speech at the Resort and Residential Hospitality Forum 2022.
The travel writer and expert gave the example of Disney, where attendance fell and profits went up because they got better at pre-selling and eliminating queues.
He added: “I‘ve been in a Marriott that had a Starbucks in the lobby and I could sign my coffee to my room, but just in the other direction across this courtyard was another Starbucks where I couldn’t do that. Why not just walk out the door and make a deal with them?”
Check-in and check-out
Check-in is a pain point for many hotel guests and Lansky highlighted a survey that showed that 76% of guests are in favour of pre-check-in and 41% will go to a specific hotel because it allows pre-check-in.
Lansky showed a well-designed text message on his phone to the audience, welcoming him to his Algarve hotel. It said: “We look forward to seeing you. Check-in now at this link. We’ll have your key waiting for you. Let us know which complimentary drink you want waiting in your room when you get there.”
“How cool is this?” he commented. “It seems like a more important thing than [a mobile key] which everyone is yakking about.”
Mobile keys are great for certain properties, in particular business hotels, but they are “a horrible idea” for resorts where guests come once a year or every three years, he reckoned: “You’re missing an opportunity to upsell all the way to the room as the bellhop takes the bags up.”
Check-out is broken too, he said: “We make guests live out of the luggage room and change clothes in the bathroom an awful lot of their stay.”
Is there another model? Art Series Hotel Group started a policy that allowed guests to stay as long as they wanted at no extra charge until the room was needed again. It made an extra $37,000 from guests using the hotels’ services. The ‘overstay check-out’ campaign resulted in a total 359% ROI.
Communication problems
Returning to communications, Lansky was impressed by an Asian hotel where the front desk staff came out from behind the counter and said: “This is my name and my phone number. I’m your personal concierge while you’re staying here. Contact me on Whatsapp. If I’m not here, your message will go to a colleague.”
An Austrian hotel that started targeting dog owners, wrote emails addressed to the dogs. “In every single case, the guests wrote back as their dogs. People loved this fun communication and when they got to the hotel, it just continued. They went from number 69 in their region on TripAdvisor to number one,” said Lansky.
When little things go wrong, there is an opportunity to ‘over-fix’ the problem, which results in guests having an even more memorable stay. “It’s a great opportunity to win over these customers for life,” said Lansky. “In fact, it’s so smart that the general manager at the Atlantis in Dubai told me that they have over 40 staff members working on it full-time.”
In summary, he said: “Evolve the quality and the experience and the rest will follow. These elements – the little communications, the way we think differently, how we fix problems, how we welcome our guests and the way we think of niche marketing – are the ways we’ll evolve as an industry.”