In the hotel industry, we are so busy talking about selling more rooms, more food and more beverages that we often overlook how effective the channels we use to market these offerings actually are. Many hotels still use outdated and ineffective marketing channels. Mobile applications provide hoteliers with a totally new channel through which they can interact with their guests on a more personal level, which increases guest satisfaction and loyalty as well as hotel revenues. Mobile apps offer countless opportunities to connect with guests that were not possible before the 2008 debut of the App Store on iTunes and subsequent adoption of mobile applications by smartphone users. In the past seven years, mobile app technology has exploded and hotels are set to benefit from it.
Personalized messages sent from the app to specific guests are key to successfully upselling products and services. Unlike other newer marketing channels such as Facebook and Twitter, which push messages out to everyone, the mobile app can target a more specific segment of guests. Personalizing marketing efforts drives revenues upwards because guests are more likely to respond.
The mobile hotel application facilitates sending personalized messages to guests through push segmentation. This technology allows the hotel to segment guests in many ways and send push notifications only to a certain selection of guests, ensuring the messages guests receive are personalized. Push segmentation provides endless opportunities to interact with a subset of guests.
Mobile hotel apps are generators of revenue because it ultimately makes conventional processes easier and more convenient for guests. As an example, guests would traditionally call housekeeping from their rooms, place the order and wait for their food. With an integrated mobile app, a guest returning from a long day of sightseeing can order room service on their way back to the hotel. It bypasses traditional methods for ordering room service and is a faster, more convenient way of ordering.
Guests seem to appreciate this convenience; hotels with integrated apps report an 18% increase in room service. A hotel app that is integrated with the housekeeping system can offer guests the convenience of ordering room service from their smartphones, and guests don’t necessarily have to be in their rooms at the time they place their orders. Because it is easy and convenient, guests are more likely to order room service.
To prevent guests from deleting the app off of their smartphone at the end of their stay, the app can have multiple features that will be useful to the guest once they return home. The app can contain chef bios, recipes, and information about local produce or specialties. If a guest particularly enjoyed a specific cocktail or signature dish when they were at the hotel, the guest can re-create it at home using the recipe within the app. By using push segmentation, on a monthly basis the app could notify users about the local specialties of that month complete with videos from the chefs, detailed recipes, and photos.
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