In every industry, there is a push to best leverage customer data in ways that help best influence buying behavior. In the hospitality arena, many larger brands are now collecting data at every point in the guest stay cycle – with the desire to enhance bookings based on travelers’ past purchasing habits.
The reality is that it is very easy to collect data from every touch point in the stay cycle. However, hoteliers should consider creating goals before starting off on developing a large data repository of guest behaviors.
The reason? Collecting and storing data costs practically nothing, and requires a minimal lift for hotel brands. The catch is making sense of the data, which starts with creating the right foundation.
Here are some tips for creating the backbone that best leverages guest data:
- Make sure everyone involved in gathering or providing the data knows how it will ultimately be used.
- Align the data gathering effort to tangible business goals.
- Generate a list of questions that you want the data to answer. The better the questions – from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives – the better outcomes.
- Keep the overall effort very simple, and avoid complexities that will run up costs.
- Continually iterate efforts to achieve better results faster.
- Design your collection methods to be painless for the guest, and only use a form when absolutely necessary.
- Always be willing to give the guest something and think about what’s in it them. Avoid gifts that have social consequences such as free drinks at the bar.
The most opportune way to gain guest long-term loyalty is to build a data foundation that can be used in the future. Once this ground work is in place, the next phase is developing strategies for generating meaningful and actionable results, which we will be covering in future blog posts.