As a hotelier, you can communicate with guests before they enter your doors. You can take the proactive route and start communicating weeks before their arrival. What you say during this period can significantly affect your guests’ satisfaction.
Hotels that leverage a thorough pre-arrival communication strategy have a significant advantage. Fortunately, it only takes a few steps to use this strategy. Here, we highlight how to navigate pre-arrival communication and how best hotel software can help.
Why Communicate with Hotel Guests Before Their Stay?
Pre-arrival communication might seem like a hassle. However, this customer service approach has incredible benefits. Here is why you should start communicating with your guests before they arrive:
● Build Loyalty: Communicating with guests before they arrive breeds trust. You can engage the guest through personalized messaging, exciting content, and exclusive offers.
● Upsell: Pre-arrival communication, used properly, presents an avenue to generate more revenue. You can inform the guests of your services and several mouthwatering options to increase spending.
● Build a Brand Image: Communicating with guests before the lodge in your hotel offers an opportunity to pitch your brand the way you want. You can paint the right picture and get them excited about your services before they even wheel in their travel bags.
● Help Customers Understand Services: Pre-arrival communication lets hoteliers brief guests on their services. You can leverage this strategy and address potential bottlenecks with lodging and other services to provide a better guest experience.
● Provide Easy Check-in: Check-in can be a tall task, especially when guests have to wait a long time. Long waiting times are a big deterrent for many guests. Fortunately, pre-arrival communication can curb this problem. You can brief the guests on how to go about checking in to make it easier and more convenient for them. Moreover, you can offer seamless check-in from their devices using hotel software like mycloud PMS.
How to Leverage Pre-arrival Communication: Tips and Tricks
The benefits of pre-arrival communication are undeniable, from building a better brand image to improved guest satisfaction. However, how can you leverage this strategy to promote repeat business and brand loyalty? Keep reading.
Take Email Communications to the Next Level
Conformational emails are the first contact hotels have with guests. These emails usually come after guests have made their reservations. You can follow the confirmation email with a series of engaging and informative emails to ensure the best guest experience. Here are some emails to consider:
● Welcome Emails: You can follow up the confirmation email with a welcome email. This email can include details, such as check-in requirements, special offers, and cancellation policies.
● Room Upgrade Offer: You can include emails that feature the option for elevated accommodations. These emails can contain information about a room upgrade’s perks, like an ocean view or king-size beds.
● Local Area Guide Email: Why make your future guest shuffle through different maps to forge a decent itinerary when you can offer recommendations? After the confirmation emails, you can include a local area guide to introduce the guests to potential fine dining and side attractions.
● Upsells: Give your guests a tour around the hotel and the amenities they can expect. You can sell the on-site attractions like spas, massages, excursions, and other interesting packages. This way, guests can prepay for them.
● Reminder Emails: Traveling is a stressful affair. Often, guests need to remember crucial information. You can send an email as a reminder. The email can include details such as parking instructions, directions, and check-in. This way, travelers don’t have to wait for time to piece everything together.
● Special Occasion Emails: Sends emails offering complimentary freebies to mark their special occasion. This information makes guests feel cherished and loved.
It helps when you have email templates. They help speed up the process of sending out personalized emails. You can then use hotel software to fill in the other details.
Leverage the Impact of Pre-arrival Texts
Emails aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. Hence, it is necessary to include texts to improve the chances of your messages getting across. Research shows that 65% of customers read their text messages within five minutes. Hence, there is power in pre-arrival texts. Here, we offer tips on how you can leverage them.
● Send Short, Swift Series: For texts, the shorter, the better. No guest would want to read four to five blocks of text. Only a few people are committed. Instead, leverage sending a short and pleasant series of texts. Keep the text under 160 characters.
● Engage as Human when Necessary: While the chatbot will handle the initial communication, it ensures that the problem is transferred directly to the relevant team, where a human staff member can take over and resolve the issue with the care and attention it requires. This process allows hoteliers to address guest concerns in real time, preventing issues from affecting their stay or leading to negative feedback.
Pre-arrival communication demands sending out engaging, personalized messages on time, which can be hectic manually. Hence, we recommend you take the automated path. How can you automate tons of messages while ensuring they are personalized? We’ve got you!
Technology is your friend in this case; specifically, we mean a hotel management system. With mycloud PMS, you can craft and send out compelling campaigns. You set the desired schedule.
Improve Guest Experience with Upsells
Hotels are more than just a room with a bed and bathroom. It can be a lot more. The purpose of upsells is to show guests that choosing your hotel comes with opportunities for an enjoyable stay.
You can leverage questionnaires to offer personalized offers to guests. If they are returning guests, use past experiences to drive home better deals. Entice couples with upgraded rooms and added romantic side attractions. Offer family guest offers like a pool pass or extra beds.
Furthermore, upsell offers are wider than the side attractions. Your hotel can opt to provide transportation and several premium services. The premium services can range from meeting rooms to extra champagne for couples.
The aim of upsells is to make the guest experience several times better. Hence, you have to make access to the offers effortless and automated. You can leverage advanced hotel software like mycloud PMS to ensure a seamless process. You can use personalized emails based on guest history, and contactless food ordering options to upsell.
Provide Pre-arrival & Contactless Check-in Options.
Long waits in the lobby can be what deter your guests from choosing your hotel next time. As a hotelier, you can prevent this by providing contactless check-in options. Contactless check-in allows guests to complete their check-in before even stepping into the hotel. This takes a chunk out of the wait time and increases efficiency.
You can leverage a hotel management system like mycloud PMS. The PMS offers a pre-arrival check-in feature where a hotelier can send a link over SMS or email to guests to upload their identity verification documents and provide instructions to hotel staff related to their stay. At the time of check-in, the contactless check-in option lets guests check in with a digital room key on their mobile phone.
You can pair the contactless check-in with other exciting offers for better reception. Some of these offers include:
● Room upgrades at the eleventh hour at a discounted price.
● Premium add-ons such as limitless WiFi access and transportation
● Offers for special occasions, such as flowers and champagne
mycloud PMS: The Best Hotel Software for each stage of guest journey
Pre-arrival communication would be an arduous task handled manually. Moreover, choosing the wrong software can lead to the loss of potential guests and ruin the expected returns. mycloud PMS offers a library of 200+ interfaces, including door lock, EPABX, Interactive TV, SMS, Payment Gateways, and High-Speed Internet Access (HSIA). Moreover, mycloud PMS won the Certificate of Excellence HTR award for 2021, 2022, and 2023. Also, 50% of the positive reviews are from luxury hotels.
How does mycloud PMS stand out?
● Cloud-Based Flexibility: mycloud PMS is entirely cloud-based, allowing hotel managers to access the system from anywhere, at any time, on any device. This provides greater flexibility and ensures that data is always up-to-date and accessible, without the need for on-site servers or IT maintenance.
● Comprehensive Solution: mycloud PMS offers a comprehensive solution that integrates all key hotel operations on a single platform. With features like Point of Sale (POS), back-office management, and banquet management, it provides a seamless experience for both hotel staff and guests. Additionally, mycloud Analytics, powered by PowerBI, delivers advanced data insights and reporting, enabling hoteliers to make informed, data-driven decisions.
Conclusion
Pre-arrival communication might be the step between you and tons of repeat guests. Undoubtedly, the strategy contributes immensely to how guests view your hotel. You can leverage pre-arrival communication for upsell opportunities and building a solid brand image.
Doing pre-arrival communication can be an arduous task. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be. Bringing mycloud PMS on board can be the difference between a seamless and tedious process. Contact mycloud PMS today to try a demo and see how well we help with pre-arrival communication.
About The Author
Deepak Chauhan
Deepak Chauhan is responsible for marketing and positioning of “mycloud” platform and is a veteran in the hotel software industry with over 25 years’ experience giving him a strong understanding of the product requirements in the industry. He has very rare mix of working in operations of various hotels and chains for over 10 years and then co-founding a software product and service company, servicing 5 star hotels and chains for 14 years.
Deepak has led the development and marketing of cloud based hospitality systems to meet the specific, business objectives of small and mid-size properties across the globe and has worked closely with a diverse group of hoteliers and hotel technology vendors.
