Hotels were advised to look more deeply into their data to help deliver a personalised customer service.
They were reassured that the process was not as complex as feared, but could help drive non-rooms revenue in a period of low occupancy.
Tom Rimmer, director of Technology for Ennismore, said: “The more data you have the less you are going to know what to do with it. We’d like to know what the preferences are of the guest as they arrive onsite, not relying on the PMS. We want to be able to offer someone a glass of red at the bar. What do you need to know about the guest? It’s probably only around 10 questions. You then know who you’re marketing to and who you’re trying to retain.
“We’re big believers in being transparent about how we use data. If we ask someone for their ‘phone number, we have to have a reason. For F&B we have to have a reason and stop just having it for its own sake. Privacy is changing. In six month’s time most people will be walking around with masked Mac addresses and there goes your wifi option telling you where the guest is.
“Communication with the guests has always been at the front of our offering. Direct communication between the guest and the property will be key - how can we circumvent those high-touch experiences and maintain that Hoxton feel?”
As with other areas of hotel operations, the pandemic was seen to be accelerating trends which were already coming into the sector.
Alan O’Riordan, co-founder of Apaleo, added: “We’ve been talking for some time about technology as an enabler, but we’ve also been wary of taking over from humans. There has been a lot of talk about robots taking over hospitality, but that’s never going to happen. But using tech to support operations, that has come to the fore. Hotels must now offer the same level of guest satisfaction, with less staff. Some of our customers have used the downtime to do a deeper dive on their systems than they might have done.
“Are your legacy systems capable of integrating into your no-touch options at low or no cost? A lot of systems are very mature, the old adage used to be ‘can you find a hotel which is using more than 40% of the functionality of its PMS?’. A lot of IT budget goes on vendor support contracts - that doesn’t leave much for innovation. But true Cloud systems shouldn’t have any capex to implement them.
“We’ve seen people who have started to look at CRM very seriously, so they can get a 360 view of the guests. The ability to analyse trends has become very important. Are checkin kicks still relevant? Is there a hygiene issue? Online checkin and checkout with automated payment may work better. You can give the guest choices.
“Digitising an F&B process is very different from digital check in. It’s definitely a crawl, walk, run. Payments, mobile keys can help with that process.
“The caveat is that we have people with app hangovers, it’s not going to shift with Covid - it has to be an omni-channel approach, giving the customer the choice in how they interact. Don’t lose the humanity in the process, chip away at it, it’s not ‘boil the ocean all in one go’.”
O’Riordan told hotels not to be wary of the cost, commenting: “Traditionally the hotel group and chains have been able to innovate and pull data together easier than the small groups, but that gap is changing and there are options now to do this - the world has changed very rapidly over the last two to three years.”
Tristan Gadsby, CEO, Alliants, drew attention to the multiple data options available to everyone, to help build a greater knowledge of the consumer. He said: “There is everything from trends on the web, data from their own devices, through to the industry insights that exist. When you mix those sources together you can really start to get insights. A lot of data sits in CRM systems and never gets used. Who are your loyal guests? How can you look after them? How can you bring them back in? What will those guests need? We tend to be a very room-oriented industry, we need to look not only at rooms, also F&B, activities, all those other ways that you can monetise guests. There are many good Cloud-based analytics platforms out there which will help you unlock value - we probably only use 5% of data which gets gathered by hotels. There are huge pockets of information and value out there that companies can unlock.”
He concluded: “We’ve never seen this situation before, travel’s never been impacted this way. It’s very difficult to try and determine what to do, but there are some things we can learn from the past. The recent Harvard Business Review looked at what the most successful companies did and what they found was a mix between cost cutting and becoming more agile. So don’t only focus on the short term, but on getting set up for success. We’ve all seen domestic travel grow and that is what companies need to attract, Technology can help in many ways, but we have to come back to the core principles of hospitality, no matter how many staff we have.”
Insight: We didn’t hear much from the global operators about loyalty programmes this results season and that’s no great shock, what with nary a loyalty point being earned for great chunks of 2020. We are now in the era of stripped-back hoteling and the programmes which were so very important this time last year have been pushed to the back of mind by the need to survive.
And this has been true not just for hotel companies, but for all of us. And when we get out of the house, you better believe that we want a glass of red wine as soon as we get through the door. Or white, or rosé, or one of those sticky dessert wines. Such is the desperation that most orders can currently be read across the customer’s face, but in the age of masks hoteliers may need more help. Help that they hoped to get from loyalty programmes, but which was still in progress at the time of lockdown.
Just 5% of data used is a shocking figure and one which the sector now has a chance to rectify. Always one to keep personal details close, this hack is prepared to break habit and start the ball rolling. Mine’s a Pinot Noir, with some green olives or classic Goldfish on the side.