How to Customize Guest Comfort Through Mobile Apps
By Emin Kara | November 14, 2023
An often overlooked point of contact with customers for hospitality businesses is mobile apps. Mobile apps are a fundamental change in how hotels and restaurants interact with their customers. Mobile apps and targeted advertising have opened up new avenues for personalization, convenience and engagement, revolutionizing the guest experience. Here’s how you can get smarter with your marketing with them.
When I imagine an app for the hospitality industry, I don’t think of some useless app that simply allows you to book or collect rewards, I think of a one-stop solution for the users. I’d say the true power these apps hold is their ability to learn the user’s behavior and preferences to provide a more tailored service. This level of personalization I’m talking about allows guests to feel valued and understood, leading to increased satisfaction and loyalty.
From here, you can go even deeper! Imagine you started doing some in-app marketing and started sending notifications to users. In theory, coupled with all the data the customers have willingly given you, you could create HYPER-personalized ads that would garner a much better ROI than, say, ads that ran on Facebook. To illustrate, if the user allowed you to use their location, you could send them notifications like “Hey, you’re near our (X Location) branch, pop inside for 20% off today!”
Another useful feature that could promote UGC is a countdown. For example, if someone has booked your hospitality business, you could send them reminders of their trip with words of excitement, prompting users to post to social media.
Another useful idea could be to implement a checklist for essential items the customer must remember to bring with them. With this, you could add a notification system that reminds users their visit is only “X amount of days away,” and they still haven’t ticked off X, Y and Z off their list. The function of the app in my mind should be more of an extension of the person and provide them value by taking away their stresses. Another way you could do this is by integrating a weather feature that suggests users what to wear based on the weather for their period of their stay.
Personally, whenever I visit somewhere I like to get lost in the city. Not in a literal sense but more of an exploration sense, whereas my partner, she doesn’t. She is incredibly organized and likes to have an itinerary for each day. So, providing a place to create and organize a day planner and having AI (artificial intelligence) provide suggestions based on the customers preference would be incredibly useful.
When it boils down to it, really it’s about getting creative with what you already have and building on top of it. Catching trends are great, but I’d rather be a little late and out do all my competition.
