Melody Wendt
New trends offer fresh hope for hospitality as sales and operational teams prepare for the new world of travel
Originally published on PhocusWire
Before we dive in, be sure to visit our ultimate guide to elevating guest satisfaction full of tips, insights and data points on how to improve your hotel service and ensure optimal guest satisfaction.
Amid the many challenges faced within the travel industry, COVID-19 has presented an opportunity for hospitality to reemerge better, stronger. As travel continues to rebuild globally, hoteliers are taking the time to reevaluate the fundamentals of how they’ve historically operated and strategize new ways to recoup lost revenue.
Fortunately, two areas of focus offer cause for fresh hope. The first is the speed of digitalization. The world’s digitization is accelerating at a rapid rate, meaning technology that was once complementary may now be essential. Incorporating digitalization and automation into everyday practices gives hoteliers the opportunity to amplify team capabilities, driving focus to what’s truly important – the guests.
The second area of focus is a renewed drive to prioritize the guest experience. The core of hospitality is and always will be about its people. No matter how the world of travel evolves, the nature of hospitality will always remain the same. How we nurture those relationships and guest experiences, however, may forever be changed.
The following strategies can help your team succeed in a world perched at the intersection of these trends.
Preparing for Increased Occupancy
There’s no challenge that brings the human-centric nature of hospitality to light more than recent labor shortages. Faced with historic pandemic-related falls in demand, hotels have had little choice but to cut back on services due to budget, often resulting in significant staff reductions.
However, as demand and occupancy return, so does hotel maintenance, room cleaning, and guest requests. Faced with these challenges along with reduced staffing levels, hotels should consider tools to help orchestrate tasks such as automating room assignments, managing housekeeping opt-out programs, and proactively scheduling maintenance checks to help give limited time back to already scaled-down teams.
Beyond the immense complexities echoing behind the scenes, there are further lessons to be learned. Rapid response times to guest requests can lead to improved satisfaction ratings. Loyalty (and return visits) also increase when guests know the hotel will meet their needs and requests with a personalized touch. Anticipatory service and attention to detail is a requirement to quickly turn a hotel stay into an extraordinary experience.
In a people-first industry, finding a balance between high-tech and high-touch has the potential to have a profound effect on guest experience while supporting hotel needs to do more with less as we emerge from the pandemic.
Rethinking Sales Strategies to Fuel Growth
Sales, by its very nature, is all about human connection. Fierce competition for business coupled with a drop-off in demand makes for a complex sales environment. Effectively prospecting, building relationships, and negotiating deals with accounts in today’s environment presents a series of new challenges. Managing inquiries, proposals, activities and tasks manually is no longer an option; speed of communication and quality of response wins business.
Structural shifts in our attitudes about work and a rebalancing of the tradeoffs with digital interactions are changing the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ behind our travel decisions. Sales teams have a unique role to play when it comes to recovery, serving as the link between the hotel’s eyes and ears in a changing world.
A recent industry survey shows that a majority of business travelers are in fact willing to travel, with 54% citing a desire to make personal connections with customers and colleagues. Understanding the traveler’s concerns when it comes to safety, sanitation and experience are critical to capturing business as it returns. Responding with flexibility, empathy and reassurance around these concerns drives the personal touch customers now expect.
For hoteliers, there is also an opportunity to fill the newly created void in face-to-face interactions that are no longer occurring in offices as remote working has become an accepted norm. Sales teams should consider how to position their properties as the preferred location to host meetups for remote teams or for local businesses that have foregone offices but still require a physical space to meet clients for impromptu meetings.
To support this more local and repeatable type of business, new technologies for online bookings and electronic options for proposals, signatures, and payments are necessary to remove friction and cost from the buying process.
While relationships are the cornerstone of sales, hoteliers will need to be open to new opportunities on how to engage, understanding that customer mindsets are likely to have fundamentally shifted as a result of COVID-19. Success will no longer be reached by simply processing leads but by combining a deep understanding of the new travel challenges customers face, and a commitment to solving them in new (and more personalized) ways.
Enhancing the Group Business Experience
Group business can generate significant revenue for a property in any given year, so it’s no surprise hotels are anxiously awaiting the return of the meetings, events, and social-related bookings. Be sure to visit our ultimate guide to grow events and group business for an all-encompassing rundown of events, sales and catering tips, data points and best practices.
Now as furloughed event planners return to hotels and global restrictions begin to ease, studies show that both consumers and industry professionals are indeed eager to resume face-to-face events. In fact, in a recent survey, 81% of meeting planners say they will hold their next in-person event sometime in 2021, most of which (59%) will fall in the second half of the year, with only 19% saying they will hold their next gathering in 2022 or later.
More group business sales mean hotels must be prepared to accommodate the requirements to support these evolving programs, as well as fundamental changes to the overall event experience. Virtual and hybrid events will remain an important business strategy in the long-term, even as physical events resume, to ensure events are financially viable and accessible to more attendees.
Safety and security protocols, followed by disinfection and social distancing protocols also show to be top factors influencing group decision making. Hotels must demonstrate that they follow stringent sanitizing, health, and safety guidelines as part of a new standard of criteria to win business. Transparency will be crucial to earning back the trust of planners and attendees, and appropriately auditing and communicating those new standards could be the value-add factor needed to close business now and into the future.
Capacity to accommodate social distancing additionally proves to be a deciding factor of whether to hold an in-person event with 77% of meeting planners saying it would affect their meeting location choice. Automated event space diagramming can help solidify a decision, allowing planners to see how your space can be set up for their event, with accurate details before they even sign a contract. To inspire even more confidence, diagramming tools can help calculate social distancing between seating, hand sanitizing stations, or boxed lunch stations.
In the world of group business, hotels that can also remove manual processes, will be able to spend less time in front of a computer and more time creating the personalized, ”wow” moments we have all been missing. Group business is all about people coming together and connecting. Those connections begin with sales and linger long after the event is over, with customers returning to hotels where relationships are strong, and the event experience has been safely reimagined.
Rebuilding Hospitality Together
Hoteliers that adapt to these new trends shaping hospitality – from operations to sales and events – will be the first to experience positive revenue impact. By considering these actions and combining a skilled staff with new technologies, as an industry we can better adapt to the future needs of guests.
Hotels will always be about people. But the reality is digitalization and automation can support and augment personal interactions at a higher level. Finding that balance is what is needed to succeed in this new – and evolving – world of travel.
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For more COVID-19 recovery best practices, visit our Rebuild Travel library full of expert insight, research, hotelier survey findings, refreshed market performance data, and more.
