4. The findings
4.3. After consumption
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Figure 13: Connie at Hilton McLean, Virginia Source : http://newsroom.hilton.com/
4.3. After consumption
Digitalization has given new tools to hotels and hospitality groups to keep in touch with their customers and to engage them by creating loyalty after they stay. Loyalty is critical in this industry because of the multitude of actors offering similar choices. Another very important thing to consider, it also enables to shorten the three critical stages in decision-making: inspiration and information, planning and evaluation, purchasing by having the customer directly booking on the hospitality group’s channel.
To create and increase loyalty and engage always more with customers, hospitality groups use social media for interaction. Through social media hospitality groups can reach their customers at anytime and from anywhere, in an omnipresent and informal way. The link developed with customers is then stronger. Hospitality groups are increasingly using this channel for digital marketing.
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really important to think of social as an ecosystem where you can adapt the messaging to tell a story over time…. much more effective than focusing on an immediate action”. Starwood: Facebook Dynamic Ads Product
Starwood is an early adopter of Facebook Dynamic Ads Product and highly utilize Facebook as an advertising platform. It enables the company to release marketing videos/posts and to follow-up with customers who have engaged or reacted to the content. The awareness of customers is instantly conversed to a direct response, which engaged the customers at a higher level.
The digitalization has also given a new weight to loyalty program, that are very important for frequent travelers mostly business travelers. The new dimension of loyalty programs is leverage by the mobile application provided by hospitality groups.
Through the app the guest receives greetings for the stay, he can access billing and invoicing services which make the customer feels valued by these attentions. The traditional greetings e-mail or sms is now personalized and comes directly on the app to interact with the customer in a less formal way.
The app collects feedbacks and ratings of the hotel, which gives very important insights to the hotel about the guest’s experience, expectations and satisfaction that lets room for a lot of improvement and advice.
The app can catch all the data from the customer journey (living standards, tastes, travel modes…), which is critical to feed loyalty programs and to personalize the offer to customers’ expectations.
These data are highly valued by hospitality groups to differentiate from competitors by tailoring the offer to customers’ needs and offering a very personalized experience, and not only offering discounts, to leverage the unique positioning of the brand.
Hospitality groups take advantage of loyalty programs to encourage customers to book directly through the app or website, using the guest account, to get extra points. Doing so, the customer is once again locked into the hospitality group’s channel, where he can not be attracted by competitors and can not compare prices and quality on digital actors’ platforms. The hospitality group also retains the whole revenue of the sales, without any commission given to intermediaries such as OTAs.
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Hyatt Hotel Corporation: Hyatt Gold Passport, loyalty Program
Hyatt Hotel Corporation has redeveloped its loyalty program and has released the Hyatt Gold Passport in the beginning of March 2017. The program has been developed by focusing on the idea that to better serve the guest, it is essential to know him better. Having a better understanding of the customers and their needs is the spearhead of this new loyalty program. Hyatt boasts personalized rewards that enables the guest to get closer from the places and people he likes.
In practice, the guest gets 5 points for each US dollar consumed in the services of his choice and that please him. The customer is not locked in a kind of standard services that does not match his needs.
For example, he can be rewarded by ordering at the bar, restaurant or enjoying the spa.
The guest can then choose to use his points either in a hotel with free nights, upgrades, spa services, meals (to choose between 800 properties and 12 brands) or through various partnerships (miles for air companies, access to VIP lounges, or car rental reductions…). The guest can also choose to offer or share points if he does not need any service.
Personalizing the loyalty program offers a very wide choice to customers that feel really rewarded and not locked in a model of consumptions they do not need. The customer satisfaction is highly increased and the customer is spurred to consume more in Hyatt properties to gain more points.
In order to shape always more the level of reward to its customers, Hyatt proposes four different levels of membership: member, “discoverist”, “explorist” and “globalist”. The guests access to the upper level when he reaches a threshold of number of nights or number of points accumulated.
This personalization enables Hyatt to reduce its costs by offering expensive rewards only to frequent customers. To do so, Hyatt relies on the data retained on the customer account. The historic of his previous travels, stays and of the services he consumed orientates the shape of the offer. The redefinition of this loyalty program relies on feedbacks of customers, consumer behavior and habits of customers that are all analyzed from a data base matched with the CRM database.
Hospitality groups are increasingly investing in their IT infrastructure and services, and CRM (customer relationship management) software are highly critical because they gather all the data about customers. The solution must be global and harmonized in order to on the one hand gather data all around the world, and on the other hand centralize them to exploit them on a global perspective.
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Using data enables hospitality groups to launch effective marketing automated actions, that can be quite simple such as based on personal information (e.g. personalized e-mail for a birthday) or more complex such as contacting potential customers after they clicked on certain marketing banners on the website of the company. Connecting this personalized marketing actions with social media is now the key for a seamless communication with customers!
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The digital transformation in the hospitality industry has highly affected the traditional accommodation services operated by hospitality groups. The customer relationship management with the leisure segment has been highly disrupted, as it is at the heart of the digital transformation giving a dominant weight to customers that are now empowered by technology and information which make them more volatile and discerning.
The digital transformation has brought many challenges: new consumer behaviors and expectations related to technology, the rise of digital competitors and an entire new economy based on the sharing of services.
Hospitality groups have to adapt in order to cope with these challenges, to stay in the race and not be outdone by competitors. On the other hand, it is also the right opportunity for hoteliers to differentiate, offer new highly valued services and then to gain market shares.
This research focuses on the customer journey, that is to say the whole path of customers going from the preparation of the trip to the after stay relationship, during which hospitality groups interact constantly with customers and put it at the heart of the customer relationship management.
By using concrete applications and uses of technology deployed by leading hospitality groups, the research shows how they cope with the highlighted challenges and how they take advantage of it to create opportunities to enhance the guest satisfaction and to differentiate.
Hospitality groups use technologies to control and improve their online reputation, to gather and analyze data from customers in order to target them with an appropriate message and to control their ROI on marketing, to offer seamless, effective and mobile booking channels full of useful information on their websites and applications that will engage more the customer and spur him to book directly.
All along the reservation process, hospitality groups offer innovative and differentiating added value services to customers. Some actors go further and face directly the emerging digital actors by opening online platforms or acquiring smaller actors offering the same kind of services valued by customers in order to gain power and attract the customers on different channels and for different kinds of experiences.