Personalisation in Hospitality: Customizing Guest Experiences through Data Analytics

You’ve probably heard the saying “customer is king”. That’s truer in hospitality than anywhere else. Here, how a customer experiences your brand makes or breaks their hospitality experience.

With a varied customer base, this can be difficult – but data analytics is one way of personalising the experience for as many customers as possible. And it can pay dividends – increasing your guest’s satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue.

In this post, we’ll talk you through what benefits hospitality staff can get from using data analytics to personalise the customer experience, and some tips for making sure you stay compliant throughout.

Benefit 1: Personalised Revenue Management

Keeping tabs on where the money goes in hospitality isn’t just vital for compliance. It can also help you focus your revenue management to target customers with pricing they’re more likely to respond to.

For example – let’s say you run a hotel, and you’ve noticed that when the temperature drops, your expensive rooms are less popular. In the past this might’ve left you scratching your head – but with data technology, the correlation is clearer. This means you can set up technology that monitors weather data and adjusts prices accordingly, making these rooms more attractive during these periods.

Benefit 2: Improving Guest Experience

You don’t have to be a veteran of the hospitality industry to know that no two customers are the same. Two people from the same demographic can have completely different tastes – but at the same time, adjusting marketing for every individual customer is difficult.

That’s where data analytics technology is a game changer. It brings together multiple sources of information – from social media to paper surveys – allowing for a more detailed approach to customer feedback. Without data analytics, you could probably work out that families make up a large amount of your restaurant’s customer base. However, data analytics will flag up that those families usually take advantage of specific deals. This opens up a conversation on whether you could extend these deals, or even focus more on families in other areas of your marketing.

Data analytics can also be used to streamline customer experiences outside of promotions.

Consider a hotel sending out alerts to housekeeping staff as soon as a room was free for cleaning, or that pre-ordered room service as a customer entered the hotel. Geolocation allows for more customer touchpoints – elevating your experience over your competitors.

Benefit 3: Personalised Additional Services

When running any business, it’s easy to focus inwards. But data analytics can help you uncover local businesses that could provide untapped opportunities for partnerships.

For example, if a set of your hotel’s customers frequently complain about transport to or from major attractions, you could use that data to set up a partnership with a local taxi company, giving your guests cheaper fares. This not only addresses a customer pain point, but also lets you easily promote your brand to new customers.

A Note On Overcoming Challenges and Ensuring Data Privacy

All of the above is great, but it means nothing if you don’t maintain data security. Rightly, this continues to be a concern in the hospitality industry – even more so when using customer data in new ways.

Aside from making sure you follow all the usual rules on data protection and have robust privacy measures, you should be transparent about how you’ll use customer data. It’s not the fun part, but going into detail – and giving opt-in/opt-out options – helps to build trust around what can be a delicate subject.

Data analytics isn’t a new invention in hospitality. However, it does offer many exciting new opportunities for businesses in the industry. By tailoring their experiences to customer needs, they can drive sustainable growth in an increasingly competitive landscape.

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