The digital economy offers many opportunities to connect better with guests. In this TV show
Riko van Santen discusses three areas to improve relationships with guests.
Digital economy and communication
Working with partnerships, the distribution channels, that's been about for a while now. So we are there and we are working with many channels of distribution in order to partner to make reaches into the markets where we perhaps couldn’t establish ourselves. So we use the internet to extend our reach in terms of the distribution channels, that's the first area. Another area is to understand also the behaviour of the guests on the internet. So not only through the existing booking channels but also how do they search? How do they read about hotels? How do they understand experiences that hotel companies are offering? There are different kinds of portals, there are different kinds of platform and search behaviours that we try to tap into to ensure we can anticipate the guest’s behaviour and to be there with our brands to provide solutions for their travel experiences. Finally the third area is to connect to say once we have made that connection and we establish the relationships with the guests, both before, during and after the stays, we can actually use that information from those 3 touch points to better serve the guests in the future or during the stay. How do we find them, where do they come, where were they searching from. What is their experience or what are they wanting to have during their stay in our hotels and post-stay after they check out, how do we make sure that we can keep the relationships with the guests without being - you know, without spamming them with emails. It’s not just a question of just sending them an email to remind them, oh thank you for staying in the hotel, come again, it’s to really understand how did they enjoy the stay, what can we do to make sure that we can anticipate their stay next time to make it even better and to grow our data base of the profile and the understanding of our guests.
The Hospitality Channel features many TV shows and briefings discussing the digital economy. Browse all the hospitality briefings here.