5 Moves Hotels Should Make to Enhance Digital Experience

As a growing number of people are looking for alternatives when it comes to workspaces following the COVID-19 pandemic, workcations have become a popular trend.

Think about this statistic to start with – the largest adult demographic in the United States, the millennials, spend about $180 billion dollars annually on travel1. With remote work options being adopted by many employers, this number is set to grow.

Travelers today look for a seamless experience throughout their customer journey, from pre booking, to stay and even post-stay, and developing a cohesive online presence to facilitate this is the need of the hour.

The digitalization of the hospitality industry is picking up pace, as it provides travelers with end-to-end services when it comes to hotel bookings, services during their stay, and post-stay engagement. In this article we’ll focus on how you can leverage technology to make your guests’ entire customer journey a seamless and wonderful experience.

The mobile-friendly approach to enhance service delivery

24% of millennials will take a workcation this year², and Online Travel Agents (OTA) have taken over the travel and leisure booking segment, as they provide users with a superior digital experience all from a single platform. These OTAs allow users to plan and book an entire holiday from their mobile devices. But they cannot provide a seamless experience once the guest checks in, that is where your digital game should shine.

As a hotel, you need to provide a similarly seamless experience during a vacationer or workcationer’s stay. With the rise in contactless service requirements, utilizing a Progressive Web App (PWA) to manage in-house services like your restaurant, room service, housekeeping services, etc., is the way to go. PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) are also a fantastic way to drive engagement with guests by displaying the latest offers, events, and news from your hotel.

PWAs do not require it to be downloaded, they are easily sharable and are platform agnostic. So, developing a PWA for your hotel that improves your guests’ holiday experience is a great component to a holistic digital strategy for your hotel.

Search engine optimization before publishing content

83% of US adults prefer planning and booking holidays online. 72% of mobile bookings happen within 48 hours of last-minute Google searches that include the words ‘tonight’ and ‘today’. 82% of all travel bookings around the world took place without human interaction3.

Like most vacations, workcations are also planned and booked using search engines. Search engines have realized this and started adapting. For example, giants like Google have started deploying new types of rich results to make the planning and booking of a holiday completely seamless. A customer can now book everything on Google, starting from finding a hotel that has the amenities a workcationer is looking for, to the cab that drops them at the airport to start their holiday, and the cab that drops them home after it’s done.

Creating content that provides great detail about your hotel is half the battle, ensuring that this content is being discovered on search engines for relevant search queries is the other half. One of the main pain points for businesses is the crawling and indexing of their content. Your Content Management System (CMS) should ensure your content meets all the requirements to be indexed for relevant search queries before it is published.

Managing local listings

76% of people who conduct a local search nearby visit a business within a day⁴.

Manually managing your business listings across channels for multi-location businesses is time-consuming and near impossible. Using a platform that allows you to manage and update multiple business profiles simultaneously will give you maximum visibility, especially, when it comes to ‘near me’ type searches.

For example, a customer that just landed in your city is looking for specific amenities when it comes to hotel bookings, ensuring that the amenities on your online business listings are up to date for multiple locations can become time-consuming. To manage such a situation, you need a platform that seamlessly allows you to bulk update and publish content to all your online business listings and channels with the click of a button.

Reply to customers via chat and capture an untapped audience

In a survey conducted by Cloudli Communications, out of 1,000 people surveyed 93% wanted to communicate with a business via text⁶.

Quickly responding to potential guests’ queries and concerns via chat across multiple channels like your website, Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc., for multiple locations will potentially drive engagement like never before.

Using a business messenger that supports multi-channel and multi-profile chats allows you, as a business, to efficiently manage and respond to thousands of queries instantly, making the customer journey between awareness and engagement seamless.

Superior Digital Experiences with Milestone

Creating a comprehensive and delightful digital experience will give your business the upper hand when it comes to capturing an ever-growing online audience. With the SEO-first Milestone CMS and Milestone Local, your visibility is assured right from the get-go as your business details are not only enhanced on search but are accurate across all locations and channels. Now that’s a big deal when it comes to reaching your audience.

With our ready-to-use add-on features such as Event Calendar, Progressive Web Apps, Reviews Module, Special Offers/Limited Time Offers module, Milestone Local Menu Manager, Social Feed, Business Messenger, and much more, you’re just a step away from creating an engaging digital customer journey and improving your guests’ overall experience.

To know more about Milestone CMS and Milestone Local, contact us at sales@milestoneinternet.com or call us at 408-200-2211.

References:

1 – https://www.hotelmize.com/blog/millennials-travel-statistics-how-do-they-travel/

2 – Directv Hospitality eBook – What Millennial Guets Really Want

3 – https://www.stratosjets.com/blog/online-travel-statistics/

4 – https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/consumer-trends/mobile-location-searches-to-store-visit-data/

5 – https://searchengineland.com/88-consumers-trust-online-reviews-much-personal-recommendations-195803

6 – https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2021/12/17/implement-business-text-messaging-to-draw-more-local-customers/?sh=8fbc18d731a6