For a hotel to thrive, hoteliers need to build a good long-lasting relationship with their customers. They need to identify the various touchpoints of a traveler so that they get the opportunity to engage with their guests.
This is why hotel customer journey mapping is important.
What Is Hotel Customer Journey Mapping?
Customer journey mapping is outlining the various stages a customer or guest goes through — right from finding inspiration to travel to booking the stay and checking out of the hotel only to keep coming back to the property.
In other words, it’s a comprehensive view of your customers’ experience at various touchpoints.
The Importance of Mapping Hotel Guest Journey
Mapping your customer journey allows you to find out how the guests are experiencing your engagement at various stages of their lifecycle. Thus, it helps in improving your relationship with them further.
Here are a few benefits of hotel customer journey mapping:
1. Higher ROI
Identifying your customers’ expectations and their wants will help increase the customer value as well as their satisfaction. By mapping your guest journey, hoteliers can find out the important touchpoints between them and their customers. They could easily detect the problem and work towards enhancing their customer experience.
The increased customer satisfaction can be directly linked to higher ROI.
2. Get Loyal Customers
Customers are more likely to return and stay in your hotel again if they had a great experience the first time. Mapping your customer journey allows you to personalize their experience, elevating their whole stay period.
3. Build Good Reputation
Today, customers like to share their opinion, views, and references on social media. In fact, they are more likely to share their negative review rather than positive experience. However, you would still find customer success stories on social media that influence other prospects’ decisions.
When you have a happy customer, it increases the chance of getting more positive social media mentions. It helps build a good reputation online, which helps in attracting more bookings.
5 Stages of Hotel Customer Journey Mapping
To make it simple, the customer journey can be divided into six categories. Let’s look at each one of them in detail.
Stage #1: Inspiration and Research
Influencer marketing is on the rise. Today, social media plays a great role in influencing people to travel.
The destination is the driving force behind inspiring customers to travel. Many hotel establishments have understood this, and thus, they are becoming more active on social media. They regularly post inspirational content, focusing more on user-generated content.
They post about different activities or attractive trips to hotels to further motivate them.
Once travelers are inspired, they start researching various destinations and shortlist a few names. They haven’t arrived at a final decision yet. You can find them browsing on the internet to find places to travel and stay. This is why it’s crucial to ensure a good reputation online.
76% of travelers are willing to pay more for a hotel with positive reviews and ratings than the one without any.
Stage #2: Booking
At this stage, the traveler has chosen their destination and date of travel. This stage is often confused with the research stage. However, here travelers are more critical about the pricing factor. They pay more attention to price comparison to book suitable accommodation that fits into their budget and experience.
The main motive is to obtain the best quality to price ratio. They split between OTA sites like Goibibo, MakeMyTrip, etc., and the hotel’s official site. Travelers search for the best options based on various preferences, such as reputation, recommendation, budget, and more.
Stage #3: Pre-Arrival and Check-in
After they have received the booking confirmation from the hotel, they start gearing up for their trip. They design their itinerary, create a packing list, and check for all documents that they need to carry.
This stage gives you the opportunity to develop a relationship with your customers. You can start by sending out a booking confirmation message along with a brochure to help them understand your property better.
Before arriving, you can do more research about their interests, their preferences, etc. You can use this information to your advantage to offer them a relevant, personalized service when they arrive. Sending out a personalized welcome message once they have arrived can make a lot of difference.
Stage #4: In-House Experience
The phase begins the moment the guest arrives at the hotel and what they do during their stay before they finally check out of the property.
This is the stage where you can gain your customer loyalty by offering them the best-in-class service as promised. Most of the time, hotels provide a complimentary spa or dinner for their guest to give them a pleasant welcome.
Based on their experience, your customers might start sharing reviews online. A bad experience can really affect your hotel reputation.
So try to stay in constant touch with your customers; keep checking on them how they are doing and make their stay a positive one.
Stage #5: Check-Out and Post Stay
This is the last stage in the hotel customer journey and as critical as all the others. Your guest is ready to bid you goodbye. But you need to make sure that they had a pleasant overall experience and were happy with your services like cleanliness, staff service, etc.
A satisfied guest is more likely to come back to your hotel for another vacation. You could either offer them a discount price or remind them of the great times they had at your hotel property.
You can segment your guests based on location and age and send out personalized reminders on their WhatsApp or other contact points. Let your guests appreciate your service and be grateful for choosing your hotel.
Wrap Up
Hotel customer journey mapping can help improve communications with your customers, enabling hoteliers to meet their customers’ desires and expectations.
In short, experience mapping can impact your entire hotel operations and success.
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