According to two recent studies, consumers are expecting digital travel experiences in the wake of COVID-19. Find out exactly what they’re looking for.

What does a successful hospitality recovery look like? Well, no one fully knows yet. While expert predictions have been extremely valuable during the pandemic, they’ve largely been based on guesswork. Not anymore.

Thanks to two new surveys, spanning over 10,000 consumers, hoteliers can get a much clearer look at how guest expectations have truly changed—and spoiler alert, the new ideal for consumers is a guest experience transformed and streamlined by technology. Here are five key takeaways for hoteliers to consider:

1. 71% of consumers agree they would be more likely to stay in a hotel with self-service technologies that minimizes physical contact with staff.

This may be a no-brainer, but it’s worth repeating: the overall goal of every hospitality strategy in 2020 is to reduce the risk of infection for guests and staff as much as possible. That’s on the mind of every consumer as they weigh whether or not they’re willing to plan a getaway. One of the best ways to sway them towards booking a stay is to equip them with mobile technology—accessible from their own devices—that eliminates unnecessary contact with others and powers a much safer stay.

2. 80% of respondents said they would download a hotel app that would allow them to check-in, check-out and get hotel information.

If you’re sensing a trend towards mobile and contactless, you’re on the right track. A mobile app enables much of the self-service, contactless functionality guests are looking for—the swiss-army knife of hospitality technology. The features that have gained the most popularity throughout the pandemic, from dining to check-in to guest-staff messaging, can all be housed in a mobile app. It’s the new MVP of guest experience.

3. 92% of consumers say they’d rather check in and out online or through an app—with only 8% preferring a kiosk.

While check-in kiosks have been marketed as digital check-in’s equal, guests aren’t convinced. Hoteliers shouldn’t be either. A kiosk may be more convenient than stopping by the front desk, but that’s not a guarantee, given lines can form. But more importantly, safety isn’t guaranteed either: unless a kiosk is cleaned between every guest, they’re touching the same screen someone else just used. Comparatively, checking in on a smartphone and heading straight to the room is an objectively better experience.

4. 35% of consumers say contactless payment options would make them feel more comfortable staying in a hotel.

Did you know credit cards are dirtier on average than urinal handles? Cash and coins are hardly better, and still dirtier than NYC subway poles. Even in normal times, those stats might gross a person out enough to never want to touch a physical payment again. These days, consumers are taking no chances. Eliminating the guest-staff exchange in favor of digital or in-app payments not only makes guests more comfortable to visit a property, but also to spend more while they’re there.

5. 47% of guests said they would be more likely to order in-room service or to go to the hotel restaurant if they could use a mobile app to place their order.

During the pandemic, food delivery apps and websites have experienced a massive boom—with nearly one quarter of U.S. adults ordering weekly in 2020. This is where hoteliers can take a lesson from their restaurateur counterparts and shift to digital if they want dining to become profitable again. Digital menus and mobile ordering can transform not just in-room dining, but also make guests more comfortable visiting your property’s restaurant as well.

Investing in technology during the most significant financial downturn since the Great Recession may seem counterintuitive, but these stats say it all. Properties and brands looking for an edge over the competition should look to technology that puts guests in the driver’s seat, letting them control their stay and service. Their reward? Increased satisfaction, bookings, and revenue.

Find out how your property can meet changing guest expectations by implementing tools that increase convenience and minimize contact post-pandemic. See mobile hospitality technology in action, including a mobile app, mobile check-in, mobile key, and more in a demo of the award-winning INTELITY platform.

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Sources:
A Data-Driven Look at Hospitality’s Recovery, Skift Research and Oracle Hospitality, 2020.
Hotel Guest Expectations in 2020, Criton Hospitality, 2020.
Dirty Money: New Research Reveals the Filthiness of Our Cash, Cards, & Coins, LendEDU, 2019.
More Americans Are Ordering Food Delivery Amid Coronavirus Crisis, Axios, 2020.

Make the most of every revenue stream with personalized guest offers and contactless messaging throughout the guest experience.

Getting guests in the door is the number one priority for hotels and resorts across the world as they begin the process of recovery in the wake of lockdowns. No market is close to fully recovered and the U.S. market in particular has seen growth stagnate in the past two weeks.

Yet while raising occupancy rates is essential to recovery, that’s not the only metric that matters. For hotels, incremental revenue can play a major role in recovery—and demand for dining, storefronts, and amenities from guests who have been forced to stay at home for months should not be discounted. How can you capitalize on that interest? Here are a few ideas:

Personalize guest messaging to boost amenity and room service revenue.

Customers aren’t just worried about their physical safety, but their economic security as well, making them even more unlikely to spend on extras during their stay. To tempt them into dining at the hotel or booking amenities, hotels need to take their messaging and marketing to the next level. 87% of marketers across all industries report a measurable lift in conversions and customer satisfaction from personalization efforts. Yet while hotels pride themselves on personalized, high-touch service, personalized marketing efforts aren’t quite as common.

With a mobile app or in-room tablets, hotels can reach specific guests at critical moments throughout their stay with tailored offers that convert at a much higher rate and raise revenue. If a couple is celebrating an anniversary, the hotel can push a specialized offer for champagne or the spa. If a family is hosting a reunion, the restaurant can notify them of a special group rate. When a loyalty guest arrives, the spa can remind them they may want to book treatments they’ve enjoyed in the past.

Using personalized offers and messaging, properties have seen up to a 20-35% uptick in in-room dining sales—which could make a huge difference for any property, especially during recovery.

Make contactless service and safety measures a core part of your business strategy.

If hotels learned one thing during lockdown, it’s that safety was the key to getting guests to return. But it doesn’t stop there—and will in fact matter throughout the entire guest experience for the foreseeable future. If guests are going to spend their hard-earned money on a vacation or getaway, they want to know they’ll be well-taken care of during their stay. Offering contactless service in every area of your property is one way to sidestep fears about safety from the start.

On the flipside, hotels are in a perfect spot to monopolize travelers’ time and wallets once they walk in the door. Guests may be unable or uncomfortable visiting local attractions they might have visited during a normal year. And if you can help them feel fully comfortable at the hotel, they’re more likely to explore everything a property has to offer.

Incorporate contactless service and distancing measures at every amenity—and then make sure guests know about it. Remove roadblocks by allowing guests to do things digitally at any chance. Hosting your storefronts and dining digitally will increase sales and allow contactless deliveries of purchases. Allowing guests to make reservations at the spa and restaurant digitally eliminates unnecessary touchpoints, ensuring guests feel fully confident in your property’s ability to keep them safe. Safety, satisfaction, and revenue are entirely intertwined right now: as your focus on safety and contactless rises, satisfaction and revenue will rise as well.

Don’t underestimate the impact incremental revenue can have on your hotel’s success—find out how you can transform dining with digital menus, mobile ordering, and touchless deliveries. Read the dining one-sheet now.

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As hospitality embraces a mobile mindset to combat COVID-19 challenges, what tools are emerging as favorites to deliver top-quality guest experiences? Here are the top contenders.

As the rest of the world has experienced swift digital transformation over the last 10 years, hotels have largely stayed true to their traditional mindset: high-touch, face-to-face service that makes guests feel special and comfortable. Now, hospitality is finally embracing a mobile mindset, in large part due to the complications created by COVID-19. With mobile hospitality technology, hotels can adjust to the new needs of travelers, delivering top-quality service while removing direct contact between staff and guests to ensure safety.

But what tools are most effective? And what are guests looking for as they begin traveling again? Four tools have outpaced all others to become the top choices for hotels around the world looking to combat the challenges COVID-19 has wrought on the hospitality industry. Here they are:

4. Mobile Staff Management

Most hotels are opening with more complex processes and less staff—a situation that puts stress on both hotel management and their employees. Increasingly, hotels are turning to automation and digitization to streamline processes and ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

With an advanced staff management platform, hotels can automate and streamline daily operations, optimize service recovery, and manage incremental revenue streams. As processes improve thanks to real-time data, the time it takes staff to complete each task can be reduced by more than three minutes—and when that’s added up over thousands of tasks a year, it can mean hundreds of valuable hours saved.

3. Digital Menus, Mobile Ordering, and Touchless Delivery

Dining is one of the most high-touch processes at any hotel or resort: guests who dine at the restaurant are surrounded by others, touch physical menus, interact multiple times with staff, and take off their masks while eating. And even if they choose room service as an alternative, there are pitfalls in that process as well.

A full suite of digital dining tools can completely transform the dining experience for guests, both in the restaurant and from their room. Digital menus and mobile ordering eliminate a significant number of touchpoints throughout both processes. And offering touchless deliveries takes things a step further, making the room service process entirely contactless. With digital dining, there’s an increase in safety for both guests and staff as well as revenue for the property. A win on all sides.

2. Mobile Check-In and Mobile Key

If mobile check-in and mobile key were nice-to-have capabilities before COVID-19 struck, they’re now necessities. Both global brands and boutique properties alike are flocking to the technologies to signal their commitment to guest safety. There are numerous reasons they’ve gained popularity, but two stand out.

First, mobile check-in was already gaining popularity with guests. In 2018, 58% said they’d welcome the chance to check-in from their phone—and as you can imagine, that number has grown exponentially given current global circumstances. And second, they’re an ideal way to create a contactless entry and exit experience for guests, who can come and go as they please without any face-to-face interaction with staff. With the safe, streamlined experience mobile check-in and mobile key provide, it’s no wonder they’re consistently top priorities for hoteliers looking to invest in hotel tech to boost recovery efforts.

1. A Full-Service Mobile App

In the quest for contactless service, no tool plays more roles or connects more services than a mobile app. It’s not only an incredibly helpful tool in its own right—giving guests 24/7 access to hotel information, safety protocols, and amenities—but also serves as a conduit for other mobile technology. Mobile dining, check-in, key, and service requests can all be housed in the app, making it a one-stop-shop for whatever service guests need, whenever they need it.

It’s not only an unmatched tool for uniting mobile technology and providing contactless services, it’s also at the core of the new guest experience post-COVID travelers are expecting. 81% of Americans own smartphones, and use them all day, every day for convenience. Now, with the added security of being able to use their own device to request service throughout their stay, a mobile app is hands-down the top tool hotels can use for recovery—one worth every cent of investment.

Right now, an entirely new normal is being formed for guests and properties. It’s no longer a question of if your property or brand will need to adopt these mobile tools, but when. Hotels that resist the change will fall behind the curve—and likely see bookings, revenue, and guest satisfaction rates suffer as a result. On the flipside, those that invest early will lead the industry and their competitors.

Interested in seeing how you can engage guests with mobile technology before, during, and after their stay?

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Enhanced cleaning standards and a basic safety strategy aren’t enough to get hotels to the occupancy rates they need. So what is?

As July comes to a close, hotels around the world have largely reopened. The United States, China, and Europe are all hoping to show significant rebounds—and are reaching varying levels of success, as reflected by hotel occupancy rates. For the week ending July 25, China boasted a 60.9% occupancy, the United States 48.1%, and Europe, which has remained more cautious, 38.8%.

Overall, the numbers bring optimistic news for the hospitality industry, but there are still significant worries as well, especially for American hoteliers. The numbers have not bounced back as quickly as some hoteliers had hoped. Yet without a vaccine, experts like McKinsey & Company and STR predict a slow, steady recovery curve, not an upward spike.

In the case of the United States, the correlation between American recovery and Chinese recovery seems to be coming to an end. According to STR’s most recent report, American recovery growth has slowed significantly due to new COVID-19 cases and relatively low adoption of mask guidelines.

As things stand now, this slow, halting recovery is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Hotels cannot simply shut down again amid spikes—but they also cannot stay profitable without raising occupancy rates. The fact is that the pool of travelers is smaller right now. How can you beat out competitors to buck the trend of slow recovery?

Make safety your entire brand—and no, cleaning standards alone aren’t enough.

No one in hospitality needs a refresher on why safety is important. It’s the core component of any successful hospitality business strategy in 2020. But many hotels have misunderstood exactly what level of safety travelers are looking for: enhanced cleaning and suggested distancing protocols are critical, but they aren’t enough on their own.

To truly impress travelers and take your safety strategy to the next level, focus on providing contactless service options. Mobile check-in, for example, allows guests to enter and exit the property without ever needing to stop by the front desk—a high-traffic area in any resort or hotel—and instead use their own device as a mobile key to access their room and any locked amenity spaces and common areas.

Dining is another place where safety measures can and should be extended. Mobile ordering, payment, and touchless deliveries make guests who are hesitant to visit hotel restaurants feel comfortable, with the added benefit of increasing revenue.

Overall, if you can transform a traditionally high-touch process or high-traffic area in order to enable physical distancing and eliminate face-to-face interactions, you’re more likely to pull in a higher number of travelers.

With that information in hand, you can begin to streamline processes, reassign resources appropriately, and optimize your reopening strategy. As occupancy rates rise, you’ll be better equipped to test, refine, and scale an already successful system—one based on hard data.

Offer guests convenience and control without compromising service quality.

With consumers in quarantine for multiple months, almost every single industry, from dining to retail to grocery, has completely pivoted to ensure consumers can comfortably shop online, then receive touchless deliveries or drive to stores for streamlined pick-up experiences. That ease isn’t something consumers are looking to give up as the world slowly returns to normal.

Instead, consumers are looking for that same digital convenience to expand into all of their service experiences post-pandemic. When they travel, they’ll want the same high-quality service hotel staff has provided over the years, but with added flexibility, digital capabilities, and control over who they interact with.

The hotels that provide a simple, mobile-first guest experience will ultimately win out over those that do not. With the ability to request contactless service or chat with staff from their smartphone or tablet, guests can tailor their stay to meet their preferences without ever needing to physically approach staff. With a completely seamless guest experience, satisfaction will rise sharply—and bookings will follow.

It’s certainly not an easy task: safety, convenience, and uncompromised service. But it’s worth putting in the work and investing in new tools to exceed guest expectations, build a strong reputation among travelers, and boost occupancy numbers to bolster recovery in the coming months.

Looking to uplevel your recovery strategy? Start at the beginning: see how mobile check-in technology provides convenient entry for guests while keeping both guests and staff safe.

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Position your property for quick recovery and lift stress from staff by streamlining hotel operations with back-office hospitality tools.

Months into the COVID-19 pandemic, the hospitality industry remains in a unique position compared to others. The novel coronavirus still poses a significant challenge to both operations and occupancy and while hotels have largely reopened, the cautious optimism shared by many hospitality experts is reliant on a slow build back to normal, not a sudden jump.

In the meantime, your team likely has even more responsibility than normal—but with fewer resources to accomplish everything. And you’re facing difficult choices: what can we afford to keep and what needs to be cut in order to make ends meet? All the while, intense scrutiny and pressure to get things just right is hanging over everyone. Yikes!

Yet while that stress is real and undeniable, it doesn’t have to overwhelm you or your staff. By strengthening the backbone of your property—your operations—you can empower employees and accelerate your recovery timeline. Here are three ways to streamline hotel operations:

Lighten the Load on Staff with Automation

In hospitality, automation has often been regarded as a negative, not a positive—something that over-promises and under-delivers. Or worse, something that works, but leads to a loss of service quality or employee cuts. In reality, it can empower employees and transform how you handle guest requests, room service orders, and more.

To be clear, automation can’t solve every problem. But tying service requests into a back-end platform ensures more efficient tracking and fulfillment, greatly reducing the chance of requests falling through the cracks and employees becoming overwhelmed. Fewer employees are needed to effectively manage them all, leaving time to focus on providing great service. Overall, backend automation can save more than three minutes of employee time per request, giving employees back thousands of minutes a month.

Streamline Hotel Operations Using Business Intelligence

Automation can transform day-to-day processes, but to solidify recovery efforts and drive higher revenue, you also need a clear look at the big picture of your business. In that respect, no tool is more useful than business intelligence. It can show you:

• How guest behavior has changed during the COVID-19 period
• Where you’re losing money—and which channels are proving most profitable
• How to identify broken processes and common service issues

With that information in hand, you can begin to streamline processes, reassign resources appropriately, and optimize your reopening strategy. As occupancy rates rise, you’ll be better equipped to test, refine, and scale an already successful system—one based on hard data.

Prevent Common Guest Issues Before They Arise

With business intelligence and automation working hand-in-hand, your property can shift from reactive service to proactive service. First, identify common friction points in every step of the guest journey. Then, look for ways to fix or remove the issues from the guest journey wherever possible. If confusion or frustration remains, pivot to communication. Let guests know in advance if service is disrupted or changed due to new COVID-19 protocols. The simple act of keeping them informed drastically reduces friction.

Once you shift to a proactive mindset, your staff will be able to breathe easier knowing they’ll likely see a drop in service requests and guest complaints, leaving them more time to handle other important tasks. And it’s not just a time-saver, it’s also a critical differentiator for your business. Proof that excellent service relies not on frequent face-to-face interactions between guests and staff, but a deep understanding of what guests need, and when they need it.

For many, investing in technology feels counterintuitive in a time like this. But it’s never been more important to have every tool at your disposal to ensure operations are running smoothly. In the end, the insights a set of back-office tools can provide will help smooth new processes and lift stress, putting your property in a prime position to rebuild and thrive as recovery begins.

See how you can streamline hotel operations to empower staff and form a proven recovery strategy.

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