Personalise to drive bookings

AI should be used to help create a more personalised booking journey, attendees of HOSPA and Profitroom’s webinar: Beyond the Buzz: How AI and Smart Website Design Are Transforming the Guest Booking Journey heard.

Patryk Łuszcz, UK regional director, Profitroom, said: “Why do we use Netflix and not Amazon Prime as much? It comes down to technology, personalisation and digital trust. That plays a significant part in how guests perceive your brand. It takes 17 touchpoints as a hotelier to turn a guest from a looker to a booker.

“We describe the paradigm shift in hotels as ‘digital Darwinism’. It’s that element of digital trust. In the UK there’s a strong advantage; we have often been leading the way with innovation. We’re more proactive with the utilisation of data to see where we might be losing revenue with guests through the guest journey. That’s somewhere we can use AI and automation to streamline the experience and drive success: with a balance from human interaction. The experiential-led offering is where many hotels win or lose.

“The ability to personalise and segment your target audience allows you to link intent to purchase and limit your clicks to reservation to as little as five clicks and even two. You see this in the airline industry: BA has a two-click checkout. You need a centralised e-commerce offering to cut your touchpoints down and that will drive revenue.  There always needs to be a call to action to create those quick wins and ensure conversion.

"We launched an AI agent earlier this year, plugged in between the AI interface and traditional interface and a key element of how AI is revolutionising is traffic, content and how you integrate with the human element for booking. Guests do expect you to know information about them and AI agents can help you personalise booking for them. It enables you to hyper personalise based on: rooms types or spa, all of which helps to drive ancillary revenue.

“How can we be optimised for AI? Being able to strategically position your rates is key for conversion, so as a business, it is useful to be able to tailor your promotions depending on locations. Guests will abandon the search if the process is too complex.”

Yogesh Ram, director of marketing, Kandima Maldives & HMA committee member, agreed, adding: “AI agents have helped to recover bookings that might otherwise be lost, so they can be super effective. You do have to stay on top of the Q&As - if the user becomes frustrated they will drop off. It’s not just a guest that’s going to be coming to your website, it’s also going to be an AI bot. So it needs to be tailored to them too. We’re trying to see how we can appear in AI search and drive links back to the hotel website. Digital PR is relevant in this: using Q&A is a good way to drive content that is relevant to humans and agents.”

Considering the most important factors for hoteliers Łuszcz said: “We must also invest in digital storytelling. It’s about how you create a compelling experiential offering for the guest. Both before, during and post-stay. You must also incorporate loyalty in both new business acquisition and retention.

“Above all, you must consolidate your guest-centric data. Cash is king, but data is key and we can only make decisions using the data we have across the funnel. Your tech providers must speak to each other across the touch points so that we don’t lose any data. Data, data data data. Data is key.”

To which Ram concluded: "But you have to turn that data into insights. You need insights to understand booking profiles, booking trends and patterns, and identify opportunities for promotional activations that can drive more direct bookings and help you compete with OTAs."