According to Google, travel customers are exposed to almost 40,000 micro-moments before even making a hotel booking, with even more digital touchpoints occurring during the guest’s welcome, stay, and departure. Each of these micro-touch points represents an opportunity to elevate and personalize your guest’s experience and gain increasingly nuanced insights into their behavior, preferences, spending habits, and customer loyalty. Hoteliers who can effectively leverage these touchpoints can build a comprehensive 360° guest profile that can personalize and elevate the guest experience 一 while driving bookings, revenue, and customer loyalty in the process.

Streamline Your Brand’s Approach to Personalization and Data Collection

Legacy, on-site PMS platforms practically lend themselves to data siloing when processing guest information. These systems, developed when cloud-based solutions were not prevalent, store guest data in isolated databases on individual property servers. This segregation hampers data accessibility and collaboration across different departments and properties within a hotel chain. Guest profiles, reservations, preferences, and other vital information remain confined within each system, limiting their ability to deliver personalized experiences.

This information siloing forces hotels to manually collect guest data, such as phone numbers and emails, during check-in or through separate processes. This manual approach is time-consuming and error-prone, often breaking the natural flow of conversations. And without a centralized data infrastructure, guest information remains isolated within each system, making it difficult to maintain consistent profiles across multiple touchpoints and guest devices, and preventing hotels from engaging guests effectively throughout their journey. Breaking free from these data silos is crucial for hotels to leverage guest insights and provide seamless, tailored service across their entire portfolio.

It has often been said that a mobile, cloud-native mobile PMS is the “heart” of a hotel’s tech ecosystem. A mobile PMS’s guest profile can store foundational information on a guest’s stay, such as reservation and rate information, calls to housekeeping, or special preferences or requests. By adopting a webhook-enhanced open API architecture, a mobile PMS can transfer this data in near-real-time, allowing for seamless integration with the hotel’s various technology platforms, such as booking engines and revenue management tools. A centralized guest profile, accessible from any device, and seamlessly connected to the rest of a hotel’s technology stack, can dramatically enhance the personalization of the guest experience, delivering actionable insights to create exceptional guest experiences.

Mobile PMS & Unified Commerce Payment Platforms: The Binary Core of the Hotel Technology Ecosystem

Recently, hotels have started pairing mobile PMS platforms with unified commerce payment systems to deliver even more personalization and cohesion to the guest experience. Unlike traditional payment facilitation systems, which divide payment facilitation between multiple separate providers, a unified commerce payment service collects all of a hotel’s payment data into a single comprehensive system that can follow a guest from platform to platform and touchpoint-to-touchpoint. By leveraging features such as payment tokenization and Merchant Initiated Transactions (MITs), a unified commerce payment system can deliver single-click mobile payments and automatic, payment-linked loyalty programs that can all but eliminate payment friction while providing valuable data on hotel performance and guest spending habits.

Together, a mobile PMS and unified commerce payment system form something like a binary star system, around which the rest of a hotel’s technology stack can orbit. Integrating a hotel’s guest profile and payment data with a Customer Relationship Manager can yield even more nuanced results, incorporating data on loyalty status, travel intent, and custom survey results. This allows hotels to automatically construct a highly detailed and dynamic guest profile to deliver highly personalized messages, offers, and experiences and can follow a guest throughout the entirety of their stay, and beyond.

Leverage Mobility and a 360° Guest Profile to Create a Personalized & Frictionless Guest Journey

Hotels can leverage mobile touchpoints and 360-degree guest profiles to enhance convenience and satisfaction throughout the entire stay. By adopting a mobile-centric approach, hotels can utilize mobile platforms such as a mobile-optimized booking engine, mobile check-in, mobile upsell tools, mobile payments, and mobile check-out to create a hyper-personalized guest experience.

A mobile-optimized booking engine lets guests easily browse and book rooms from their mobile devices, enabling a seamless and convenient booking experience. A hotel can also deliver personalized recommendations and offers for room upgrades or stay experiences based on past preferences and behavior, ensuring a more customizable booking process.

Mobile check-in enables guests to bypass the front desk and complete the check-in process through their smartphones, creating another touchpoint for hotels to deliver personalized offers for room upgrades and amenities, sent directly to the mobile device in their hands. By analyzing the guest profile, including past preferences and spending patterns, the hotel can offer targeted promotions, such as room upgrades, spa treatments, or restaurant discounts, enhancing the guest experience and driving ancillary revenue. Integrating with a mobile Point-of-Sale (POS) system can extend this hyper-personalized mobile-first journey into the in-stay dining experience, allowing guests to order from their smartphones and receive offers for meal enhancements based on previous preferences or behaviors.

Mobile check-out can also streamline the departure process, allowing guests to review and settle their final bill instantly, or opt to extend their stay with a monetized late check-out. Check-out also serves as an excellent opportunity to collect valuable feedback and ratings, further enhancing the guest experience and enabling the hotel to continuously improve its services. Mobile payments tie this entire process together by providing a friction-free payment experience that lets guests pay how and where they want, whether in person, through a guest-facing kiosk, or on their smartphone.

Give Your Staff All the Information They Need to Make a Genuine Connection With Their Guests

A mobile PMS combined with comprehensive guest data empowers hotel staff to meet guests where they are and create highly engaging and organic interactions. Armed with a mobile PMS, staff members have instant access to the entire guest profile in real-time, allowing them to tailor their approach, offering personalized greetings and recommendations. With a holistic view of guest data, staff can proactively anticipate needs, whether for a specific room preference or dietary restrictions. Moreover, staff can capture and record guest interactions and preferences on the go, ensuring a seamless transfer of information across departments that can help streamline hotel operations and foster a sense of care and attention that enhances the overall guest experience.

About Stayntouch

Stayntouch delivers a cloud-native and guest-centric hotel property management system (PMS) with a comprehensive library of over 1,100 integrations. Stayntouch's cloud-native PMS empowers independent hotels, hotel groups, and management companies to drive revenue, reduce costs, enhance service, and captivate their guests. In 2022, Stayntouch launched Stayntouch 2.0, a fully integrated technology suite featuring its core cloud-native PMS and guest kiosk solution, a comprehensive chain management module, a seamless booking engine (Stayntouch Booking), a robust payment processing platform (Stayntouch Pay), and a powerful channel manager. Stayntouch 2.0 enables hotels to streamline their operations, maximize and diversify their revenue streams, and deliver an even more enhanced guest experience with the innovation and support of one trusted technology partner. Stayntouch is supported by a team of professionals with deep roots in the hospitality industry and is a trusted partner to industry-leading management companies including Sage Hospitality, HEI Hotels & Resorts, and EOS Hospitality, innovative independent brands such as Village Hotels, Pod Hotels, and First Hotels, and iconic flagship properties such as the TWA Hotel, Showboat Hotel Atlantic City, and Zoku Amsterdam. For more information, visit www.stayntouch.com.

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