The concept of guest personalization is nearly ubiquitous in today’s hospitality arena. While many hoteliers have been using the term “guest personalization” throughout their public relations and marketing efforts, there are some brands that are actually bringing this idea to life.
For example, the new Renaissance New York Midtown Hotel offers a team of lifestyle concierges with hyper-local knowledge. They work with guests to curate a continuously changing database of detailed information on events, restaurants, shopping venues, shows, and other local discoveries near the hotel.
The hotel even offers a “Navigator Table,” located in the lobby where guests can interact with these lifestyle concierges for personalized recommendations.
Along these same lines, many hoteliers have been enhancing their loyalty programs to focus on the next-generation travelers. As highlighted in this recent Hospitality Technology article, the future of loyalty programs will be all about hyper personalization, programs that reflect the spirit of the brand, ease-of-use and more enticing rewards.
All of these enhancements to guest personalization are certainly laudable, but come with challenges. For example, the Renaissance will most likely find it difficult to scale out this lifestyle concierge offering to smaller markets throughout the U.S.
In addition, for next-generation loyalty programs to truly come to life, hotel brands need fully interoperable data systems that allow any front-line worker to access guest preference information. This is a challenge that many other industry sectors are also trying to overcome, which is all about freeing the data from legacy systems to make it truly actionable.
To monetize guest personalization, hoteliers require instant access to data, and need to have their staff trained on using this information. The hotel arena is taking steps in the right direction, but genuine personalization requires major shifts in innovation and hotel personnel – where real-time data makes it possible to please the guest during all points of their stay.