Skift + Cendyn/ONE Present:

specialreport

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Hotel CRM : Enhancing Guest Profiles and Automating Communications

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Data is driving the evolution of guest profiles and guest lifecycle models. As the insights emerging from analytics technology give marketing and operations a better understanding of guests’ behaviors and preferences, hotel bookings, services, and ancillary outreach are poised to become more effective still.

Advancing far beyond the traditional name, address, and phone-number origins, guest profiles under the lens of data analytics give hotel leadership the power to look deeply into consumer characteristics and how they change over time — from a single experience on-property to all the choices constituting an individual’s preferences and propensities across months, years, and decades.

Analytics, when applied to an integration of all the data a hotel can access, are poised to create outreach opportunities not only from on-site metrics, but also by mining social media, hotel web channels, and other sources for actionable insights. This newer, emergent understanding of the hotel guest becomes a single version of truth — a more accurate portrait of the travel consumer across a wide spectrum of activities.

Data is also redefining what a guest lifecycle model can represent, expanding the concept from a focus on decisions and expenditures throughout a guest’s single journey to one that encompasses even greater spans of time and activity. This allows marketing and ops to analyze how consumers spend in numerous environments and leverage this expanded milieu to identify new prospects.

Key to achieving these goals is the hotel’s ability to acquire new insights and take efficient, streamlined action to reach guests when it identifies a close match between individuals and offers. Automation is a major advantage in this respect. From initial parsing to delivering actionable opportunities to then allowing teams to execute on those opportunities and win conversions, data automation is about taking guest intelligence — including enhanced profiles and expansive guest lifecycles — and pushing those considerations to the frontline of hotel communications. This strategy applies to numerous channels, including email, customer relationship management systems, messaging platforms, and beyond.

If there are challenges in these developments, for hotels, they lie in how quickly and effectively business leadership can adopt, execute, and track the technology driving the change. Key solutions include practices and partnerships that standardize datasets and generate accurate, actionable reports based on the campaigns analytics fuel. Data-technology partnerships stand to open pathways to access and implementation, however. From small and mid-sized organizations to legacy brands, third-party solutions may well alleviate much of the burden that comes with what are typically costly and time-consuming in-house build outs.

Executive summary

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About Skift

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Executive summary 3

Table of contents 4

Introduction: data, guest intelligence, and hotel communications 5

Guest intelligence: seeking a single truth-version in enhanced

guest profiles 7

Defining the enhanced profile

Reinvestigating the guest lifecycle

Automating communications: applying enhanced profiles to

marketing and ops 10

Empowering marketing and ops with dynamic

guest outreach

Measuring impacts, choosing metrics, finding

technology solutions

Insights and strategies 15

Executive Letter 16

Endnotes 17

Table of contents