How to Personalize the Guest Experience at Your B&B

January 24, 2023 Justine. S
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In order to provide the best possible guest experience, your hotel or bed & breakfast must personalize its offerings. With data-driven personalization on the rise, the latest trend in the hospitality industry is delivering personalized services while leveraging technology to your advantage.

Personalization is essential for providing thoughtful and responsive customer service that allows guests to have a pleasant stay and create lasting experiences. It may help your property stand out in today’s competitive industry.

As an independent hotelier, the best way to deliver exceptional personalized experiences is to ask questions and obtain feedback from guests. What kinds of activities or services do guests prefer? Is the guest traveling for work or pleasure? Do they have any allergies? Do they need specialized care?

6 best practices to provide a more personalized guest experience

1. Build guest profiles

The foundation for truly personalized hotel service is built on data and insights.

Collecting guest contact information is essential for building loyalty and delivering an excellent guest experience through pre-arrival, in-stay, and post-stay communications.

One of the primary goals of providing personalized customer service is making your guests feel as if you know them, their history at your hotel, and their preferences.

Customers do not want to be asked to repeat themselves or to feel like just another room number at your organization; instead, they want to feel as though you and your staff actually take interest in them and genuinely care about their stay at your property.

For both online bookings and reservations handled by your front desk staff, ensure that you have a booking engine with a booking form that requires guest contact information via mandatory form fields, such as a postal address, email address, cell number, etc.

This is essential, especially if you have new guests staying at your B&B. A few perks of integrating a user-friendly booking engine is that it allows guests to reserve a room directly through your website without needing assistance.

2. Capitalise on upselling tools

No one enjoys being bombarded with offers when they arrive at their destination. And chances are, your front desk manager doesn’t have the best sales skills. That’s why online check-in has been identified as the most opportune time to upsell, particularly to millennials who don’t like to make snap decisions but rather make buying decisions in their own time and collaboratively, according to Forbes.

But how do you upsell during online check-in? Easy, you can activate an automated upselling list to appear on the online page in your PMS that allows guests to purchase in-room extras, experiences, and room upgrades before checking in. This way, you can increase your hotel revenue without lifting a finger.

3. Balance staff workload

Many hotel businesses had to deliver the same if not better quality of service with less staff during the pandemic. As a result, hotels have started to use hotel technology to automate guest communication and provide guests with in-room self-service options.

Now that the self-check-in process is popular among travelers, you’ll have more time to focus on your customers. And when your staff is no longer tied up by checking in guests during busy periods, they can focus on greeting guests, giving them tours of the property, and answering any questions they may have.

4. Identity card scanner

We didn’t think it could be more efficient than online check-in, but now guests can scan their identity documents with OCR technology that auto-populates their information into the correct fields. This includes passports, and other forms of ID.

In the future, hotels may no longer have to ask guests for identification. This makes everything more convenient for the guests and helps hotels save a lot of time and money.

5. Self-service meets personalization

The great paradox. Millennials, the largest generation of travelers between 24-39 years of age, demand self-service solutions but also crave true, authentic, and personalized experiences. This is where hotel online check-in lends itself as the perfect middle ground between the two strong preferences.

It’s both a self-service solution, and hotel managers can add the human factor with personalized welcome emails and targeted upsell lists.

6. Promote a better guest experience

It’s no secret that a great guest experience is the key to success, and providing an exceptional experience starts long before guests arrive. Offering online check-in services is one surefire way to meet guest expectations and maintain a flexible business in a hyper volatile industry.

Wrapping up

Online check-in is one of the most sought-after features in hotels. It’s convenient, quick, and best of all? It can be used in clever ways to increase your revenue. If you’re interested in providing this service to your guests, simply book a demo with a local member of our team.

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Justine. S

Justine is a Content Manager at RoomRaccoon, bringing her background in language and communication studies to the SaaS world. When she's not writing about the latest trends in the industry, she's probably out exploring the world or indulging her love of pink.

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