How to Maximize your Growth in the Hospitality Market Rebound in 2022

The hospitality industry is turning to technology to inform the “new normal” and build a loyal and grateful clientele in the decades to come. For two years, it’s been a difficult time for those working in hospitality. Hotels, restaurants, and other tourism-dependent businesses have taken a nose-dive under the 2020-21 covid pandemic. Some have had to release staff and others have closed their doors indefinitely. Recovery is not predicted to occur until 2022 at the earliest, with some reports suggesting that full recovery will not occur before 2024.

However, there are many things businesses can do, as the countries reopen for internal and global tourism, to maximize revenue and pull in more customers. Let us look at what hotel chains and other businesses need to do to gear up for the long-awaited revival.

How Can I Use Technology Post-Covid19 to Boost Hotel Reservations?

There are many ways that hoteliers can rebuild their clientele using tech, like engaging customers more proactively, leveraging social media, flexible staffing, and explore new business models. The most important thing, however, you must do first and foremost in this environment of high fixed costs yet drastically reduced revenues, is to prioritize the areas you want to invest in.

1. Actively Engage Customers:

There is so much more you can do than just open the doors, even with stringent anti-viral measures in place, and wait for customers to troop in. Analysts recommend actively pursuing guests through mailing lists and direct email campaigns, social media, and refreshing videos, and perhaps YouTube clips. If you have an already existing video library, you can use a search inside video technology solution to discover the most relevant clip and promote that.

You can use all these avenues to highlight the safety and other measures you are taking to welcome guests back and to emphasize that their experience will be comfortable, safe, and enjoyable. Further, you can use special offers, discounts, and promotions to lure back holidaymakers, day-trippers, and even backpackers, without making sweeping cuts to prices. This will also discourage an unproductive price war with competitors.

2. Move Customer Touchpoints Online

With customer hesitancy in mind, hospitality venues will have to strike a balance between old-fashioned interpersonal contact, which may no longer be possible, with technology-assisted approaches.

From online hotel booking and ordering systems to delivery services and virtual helpdesks instead of in-person concierge services, you can still make visitors feel special and pampered without face-to-face contact. Easy to navigate online portals can still offer a luxurious service. You just have to make sure that they are convenient and well-designed.

3. Embrace New Business Methods

With venue seats limited due to social distancing, and international travel much-reduced, hotels, casinos, sports venues, and restaurants need to develop clever ways of bringing in revenues. One interesting way that some restaurants are dealing with this, is by opening “ghost kitchens” for delivery-only meals, and sports venues are offering subscription-based online access to filmed events.

Hotels too can find many ways to focus their efforts on “staycation” guests, rather than looking to overseas markets, as well as finding ways to attract off-season visitors.

4. Pivot to Agile Suppliers and Workforce

Flexibility in employment practices will be key since there are likely to be unpredictable surges in clientele for some time to come. There will also be sudden requirements to hire, release or transfer staff from one role to another. For example, cleaners may be drafted in to provide thorough COVID-19 sanitization or supplementary staff kept on standby to meet sudden demand.

Likewise, regular goods orders may have to be curtailed in favor of a more bespoke approach and suppliers will have to fall in line with this.

How can I reimagine customer experience (CX) with AI?

Social media listening, sentiment analysis of product reviews, aspect-based emotion mining of feedback are all key to building up an engaged customer base and understanding what they want and where gaps lie in service provision. Fortunately, there is a range of technological solutions for trawling online content to answer these and other questions.

Below we’ll break down some vital tools open to those in the hospitality industry to help them target potential patrons in 2022 and beyond.

• Use Review Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is an AI-powered process that can determine what people are saying about your brand. It is sophisticated enough to identify and separate positive and negative comments, aggregate star reviews, and identify recurring themes. It simplifies the laborious task of sifting through the likes of Booking.com, Trip Advisor, Yelp, and Travelocity, to name but a few.

Once you have this data in analyzable form, key themes may emerge. Customers are unhappy with booking restrictions, early check-out times, menu choices, or other readily adjusted parameters of your business. Alternatively, there may be things they enjoy, which you might expand – outdoor morning yoga sessions on the lawn, complementary streaming services, terrace bar opening times, or pet-friendly services. sentiment analysis on reviews can simplify the voice of the customer analysis that will enable you to meet your guests’ expectations.

• Try Social Media Listening

Social media influencers’ opinions count, particularly amongst the young, more than you might imagine. One statistic reported by Socialmediatoday is especially startling – since COVID, 90% of marketers have reported their social media marketing has been as effective or more effective than in pre-pandemic times. These influencers can be highly persuasive and help nudge younger holidaymakers and diners back to your business.

An AI-powered text analytics solution can locate mentions of your name from online text or logo even from a t-shirt, spoken word, or video thanks to its video content analysis technology. Once more, it is about trend and opportunity spotting, generating ideas about where to place your marketing spend.

• Leverage Overall Feedback

Aspect-based sentiment analysis is a technique of data-driven insight that digs outexactly what people are commenting on and whether their feedback is positive or negative. However, this is of limited informational value. Aspect co-occurrence takes this a step further, identifying which different aspects of your business are often mentioned together and in what context.

These co-occurrences can be compared to your main competitors. Patterns can be identified which will help you shape your business direction. For instance, if people often compliment your menu, but rarely the restaurant’s design, yet these are frequently mentioned together in a rival’s reviews, you may have an ambiance issue. Alternatively, people visiting a rival hotel’s spa may comment on the lack of a swimming pool. You possess both facilities and can now offer a 2-in-1 deal and attract more visitors.

Thus, a sentiment analysis platform can be a hugely sophisticated tool and yet highly cost-effective for examining your business model and identifying new opportunities.

Use the right VoC tool to boost your business

As hospitality venues reopen, people will be keen to resume aspects of their leisure time they have missed during the covid19 lockdown. That they may remain hesitant about how to do so safely is an obstacle you can overcome with new approaches to marketing and market research. Thanks to Repustate’s sentiment analysis API, this can be a very easy task for you. The solution is available on Cloud and as an on-premise installation. And it understands 23 languages natively, which means, whoever your guests are, or wherever your locations are, you will always be able to meet your customers’ expectations and beyond.

There are new business opportunities that you can discover with the API as well. These can be identified with a thorough text analysis of what past and present clientele are saying about you and your competitors. By taking a more proactive approach, it ought to be possible to enjoy something of a boom time in 2022 and onwards.

Life won’t be the same as it was pre-pandemic, but humans will always need to relax and escape the humdrum routines of their working lives. With AI-backed technology, you can fulfill their expectations with the most efficient and desirable customer experience.