by Danilo Caballero | Sales Director for Hotel Operations
Providing an outstanding guest experience is instrumental in driving repeat stays. One factor in this is being able to provide multiple channels through which guests can engage with the hotel, whether they need to order room service, request towels, make a dinner reservation, or ask about gym hours. In addition to making your request in-person or calling the front desk, guests are increasingly valuing the option to communicate with the hotel via messaging. Hospitality Technology’s 2022 Customer Engagement Survey found “73% of study respondents embrace the use of mobile devices to make reservations and to interact with a hotel,” making a guest messaging tool a valuable touchpoint for your property.
Do you know what to consider when evaluating guest messaging tools? Here are the top three factors to weigh:
Intuitive: Is the tool intuitive enough to have a high adoption by hotel staff and guests? Guests appreciate having options, and we’ve found two of the most popular chat options to be SMS texting and WhatsApp, which currently has 2 billion users across 180 countries. For hotel staff, you need a system that is easy to learn and provides pre-set responses to quickly reply to common inquiries.
Integrations: How seamlessly does the messaging solution connect with your PMS and any other task management or service optimization systems you have in place? Eliminating barriers to facilitate the completion of requests and escalation of conversations, will speed up the resolution time and boost satisfaction scores. You should aim for seamless connectivity and, even better, a single data source to reduce the risk of conflicting data from different systems.
Broadcast Messages: By keeping guests informed about experiences such as hotel events, happy hours, and spa services, hoteliers can tap into higher in-stay revenue. With a broadcast message to all guests, it’s easy to keep everyone informed, delivering better on-property experiences while driving additional revenue. Elevating experience is about encouraging guests to utilize all the services and amenities the property has to offer. Having the right system in place that can communicate to an individual, group, or all guests will help you seize the opportunity.
In conclusion, searching for a guest messaging system requires thinking about both your staff and guests’ needs. Key elements to consider are ease of use, connectivity with other hotel systems, and flexibility on how to reach out to guests. Guests who find it easy to communicate with your staff have higher satisfaction rates and repeat stays. We’ve even seen the implementation of Nuvola’s Guest Chat result in properties being able to reduce staff because they no longer needed someone dedicated to answering guest phone calls. A strong guest messaging system is an important part of your toolkit for smooth on-property operations, with clear traceability of what is happening to ensure brand standards are met.