Today’s Millennial Guest is young, digitally focused and highly connected. As such, their expectations for travel are already set as they move through a world full of rapid interactions on mobile devices used to streamline the smallest of tasks in their lives.
The Millennial Guest is also very advanced in using the most cutting-edge social mobility apps and continues to seek new mobile experiences, while quickly retreating from more mature social networks like Facebook. Simply put, they are the early adopters and shape the future development of innovation.
As such, they have high expectations from large hotel brands when it comes to mobility. Millennial Guests demand frictionless access to anything, anywhere, at any time, and quickly abandon experiences where their expectations are not met. In the offline world, these expectations are equally high of all service providers.
Millennial Guests look for and expect digital interactions that share their unique approaches to discovery, planning and acting on intent.
Meanwhile, hoteliers continue to make significant investments to provide Millennial Guests an experience that both delights and creates loyalty. However, in general, the time-to-market for apps is not meeting the expectation of Millennial Guests who are accustomed to seeing new features added in rapid succession rather than receiving a completed app on the first release.
By adjusting expectations and working on initiatives in parallel, apps can be released to Millennial Guests in shorter timeframes, while preserving the overall goal of providing an app that addresses the entire stay-cycle. And, by using behavioral analytics, apps can be modified employing user interaction to augment feature priorities that produce higher utilization with each successive release.
Staying one-step-ahead of the Millennial Guest is no easy task. A hotel brand needs to provide a superior digital experience coupled with high touch service. This will help a hotel win in the battle to capture this audience and in the process, they will learn how to better target Millennial Guests with offers on which they will take action, and generate additional incremental revenue in the process, across the entire stay-cycle.