We are changing the world with technology and as such, every business sector has to change with the times or get phased out.
In recent years, we have seen advancements in communication with the use of webinars, web conferences and chatrooms to relay messages between users; 24-hour customer care representatives on various interactive websites; ease of use of mobile payments such as PayPal and Mpesa; e-commerce platforms which have allowed business people to operate their businesses online; virtualization of different real-world activities as well as business intelligence.
The hotel industry has seen its fair share of advancements including online booking which allows the customer to check the availability of a room and book it at their own leisure. It has also brought into use the virtual concierge that enables guests to seek services at their convenience throughout their stay.
Thirdly, the c has enabled the customers to pay for their services with ease from their phones. Hotels are using smart technology to tailor each guest’s stay according to their preferences in terms of control of power and lighting and temperature control. Furthermore, hotels have upgraded technology in their rooms to allow guests to access Wifi seamlessly from their phones for their operations and installed smart televisions for guests to access streaming services such as Hulu and Netflix.
The use of robots has kicked off in hotels as they perform different functions such as handling payment, ease of check-in and check out, delivering amenities and luggage to guests as well as identifying poor wifi zones and transmitting the information to the IT department for repair and maintenance.
In an effort to market themselves, hotels create a strong social media presence through blogs and reviews on review websites that improve their online reputation. Hotels ensure that they deal with the reviews from the websites efficiently.
They improve on the areas stated in the negative reviews and raise their standards whenever possible based on suggestions made by their guests. Hotels create pages on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram among others to increase their social sharing.
Furthermore, hotels create a local check-in site for their guests to book online. Other methods of marketing hotels include: creating a website with an optimized content strategy that is both user-friendly as well as mobile-friendly, using efficient OTAs, and creating relationships with travel agencies to boost bookings as a large number of tourists prefer using these travel agencies.
Hotels use bots, which are computer programs that talk like humans, to improve customer service as they are always available. They use them to monitor consumer usage and therefore can generate personalized advertisements which increase awareness thus boosting business.
Furthermore, the bots communicate using natural language which is easy to understand across the board. Localization is a marketing strategy which is essential when adapting to a certain market. Hotels use localization to adapt the original content to the local residents which then generates interest among them, enticing them to visit. It is, therefore, an important strategy that should be used by hotels.
Artificial intelligence is the future of conversational marketing. Instead of the more common one-on-one personal conversations between the customer and the hotel business, the machine mimics human conversation to achieve the same goal as conversational marketing including giving answers to customers and potential customers.
This approach boosts business and automates marketing as it allows the machine to do things without giving it detailed instructions on what to do. These AI-powered bots ease the harvesting of data from valuable customers, for example, e-mail acquisition, their online search information, and their other web activities in order to learn more about them and to enable the hotel to tailor their business to suit a larger demographic of their customers.
Successful apps are necessary for hotels as they enhance customer experience at a hotel through a superior self-service model which increases the speed of service thus improving the relationship between staff and guests; boost business through loyalty programs; attract the millennial market and enhance the hotel’s social sharing. Although the cost of an app is way high, there are many funding opportunities that can help you out.
In conclusion, hotels should engage the following strategies to boost business: using bots, AI conversational marketing, creating applications about their hotels for customer use, localization of the content on their websites also efficient social media marketing.
