U.S. consumers are of two minds about travel and hospitality (T&H). On the one hand, they increasingly want to cultivate authentic experiences, whether that means a farm-to-table meal or navigating the back streets of Saigon on bicycle.
On the other hand, consumers want that access with a minimum of friction. Accustomed to the ease and convenience offered by brands such as Amazon, Netflix, and Starbucks, consumers expect mobile check-ins for their hotel rooms and brands that recognize them when they walk into their lobbies.
Like other industries, T&H has been working to employ digital interfaces to help streamline interactions and offer consumers more control over such experiences. This year, industry players continue to integrate mobile while taking early steps to assimilate the internet of things (IoT), robot-manned front desks, virtual reality, and other innovative, emerging tech into the experience.
Let’s take a look at their efforts.
Improving The Customer Experience
Imagine the next time you check in to a hotel and the hotel figures out you’re traveling for leisure, not business, and books you a room with two double beds. Without having to ask, the hotel also remembers that you’re allergic to feathers and gives you a foam pillow and has a bottle of pinot noir–your favorite–waiting for you. Such is the magic of predictive analytics. Yet most hotels are still far from that level of implementation.
“Integration is always the barrier,” said Alan Young, president and co-founder of Puzzle Partner. “There are systems in place that have been there for 20 years and systems that were born last month. There really is not definitive standard for integration.”
T&H brands realize that much of the friction consumers experience is wrought by the fact that brands don’t recognize them. Checking in to a hotel can be a pain because the employee behind the desk needs to find you in the system and verify your identity. “When you get to the front desk, they say hello and ask you for your identification and credit card, and then they stare at the screen for 20 minutes,” Young told CMO.com.
Brian Hopkins, an analyst with Forrester Research, said that harnessing the internet of things (IoT) can help travel brands address this shortfall. “If you think about the travel and hospitality industry, it goes on everywhere,” he said. “It’s in airports, it’s on airplanes, it’s in hotels, it’s in cities.”
Hopkins told CMO.com that in the near future, marketers in the industry will use IoT devices such as beacons to recognize consumers in such locales and use that data to inform their customer service. Using such data, hotel staff will know when a customer has landed and when he enters the hotel.
Getting to that level means shifting from siloed campaigns to always-on multichannel experiences, said Andy Kauffman, VP of digital marketing for Marriott International.
“It starts with shifting the mindset from only thinking about what we as marketers want to tell consumers to what we can offer consumers that they really want to hear,” Kauffman said. “While technology and data, in part, is driving this shift, it’s really about having a deep understanding of guest behavior and having content–lots of content–to scale the experiences.”
Various hotels have also been experimenting with eliminating the front desk since 2010 or so. The Henn-na Hotel in Japan even has a robot manning the front desk. Another option is to avoid the front desk entirely by checking in on a mobile app. In 2014, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide (which has since been bought by Marriott) began offering mobile-based check-ins. Instead of getting a key at the front desk, guests could use a virtual room key and enter by using their smartphones.
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That hasn’t stopped others from trying to colonize messaging. In May, Las Vegas’ Venetian Hotel became the first hotel in the city to offer bookings via Facebook Messenger. The brand uses a Facebook-based chatbot named Luis. Luis, which was created by Microsoft, lets potential guests check room rates and get other info without leaving Messenger.
Another area of focus is the way consumers book. “When you look at how people book or buy things in other industries, I see people book in an ad hoc fashion,” Puzzle Partner’s Young said. “You’ve got an environment where you can pick and choose.”
In the hotel industry, those options are called “features” or “amenities.” Young said that in the near future, consumers will be able to book by amenity. “That means, ‘I want to be on a high floor on a balcony overlooking a lake’ before they get to the room they want,” he added.
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Creating and Sharing Experiences
Savvy marketers in the segment realize consumers are their best brand ambassadors and that providing unique experiences is what creates such evangelism. If you can create an experience that’s easy to share on social media, that’s even better. That’s why in June, Royal Caribbean introduced “SeeSeekers,” a scuba mask with built-in Snapchat Spectacles. Royal Caribbean CMO Jim Berra told Adweek that the brand is looking to patent the product and start renting them to guests this fall.
Though Millennials aren’t Royal Caribbean’s primary audience—Gen Xers and Bay Boomers are—the demo is growing, and the brand is looking to attract young Millennials who might already have kids. The SeeSeekers launch came after the brand introduced wearable technology in January that is designed to help personalize each consumer’s cruise experience with wristbands that use Bluetooth and NFC.
Virtual reality (VR), on the other hand, is more about experience than sharing. Though the install base for VR is still small, some, including Marriott, see it as a vehicle for highlighting experiences. Marriott’s “VR Postcards” give guests a taste of locales, such as the Andes mountains in Chile, an ice cream shop in Rwanda, and the streets of Beijing.
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Source: CMO