How properties can enhance their guest experience

Research from Expedia Group recently revealed that chain hotels are 77% more likely to increase technology investment than small, independent properties who are more likely to prioritize room renovations.

This divide may not shock the hundreds of thousands of boutique hotels, inns and guesthouses who participate in our travel marketplace - but it inspired us to consider how the real-time data and tools in Partner Central can help hoteliers deliver exceptional guest experiences, no investment required.

Understanding the guest experience journey

A guest experience describes the touchpoints and emotions a traveler experiences before, during and after a hotel stay. Many of our partners are passionate about creating the special moments that transform a simple holiday into the trip of a lifetime – it's why many travelers love staying in independently owned properties. The opportunity is for Partner Central to augment their expertise to create a more consistent experience for the traveler, and more time for hoteliers to spend delighting them.

Below we’ve mapped the data insights and tools that support decision-making, guest interactions and review management across the pre, during and post-trip journey. Read on to discover how OTA tools can improve the guest experience.

1. Shop & Book

As travelers are researching and planning their trip – evaluating properties and examining dozens of photos – Partner Central helps hoteliers target and engage those who will be the best guests for their properties.

• Content Score
  Having a detailed property profile that attracts the right travelers, answers questions and sets accurate expectations is critical at this stage. Using data from hundreds of millions of traveler searches and surveys, Content Score evaluates each listing, highlighting areas that likely aren’t meeting traveler needs. Scores can be compared across similar local properties, quickly providing more insight to help you win bookings in a competitive market.

• Rev+
  As travelers narrow down to a short list of properties that meet their needs and begin comparing rooms and prices, it’s important for your rates to be competitive. This can be hard when you’re busy and market conditions fluctuate. Partner Central’s free revenue management tool, Rev+, aggregates and analyzes real-time market data and gives you the insight you need to make strategic pricing decisions - a view of market demand and pricing changes for up to a year in advance. To help you respond quickly, price optimization alerts let you know when Rev+ detects your rates are too high or too low.

• Promotions
  When you want to proactively grow bookings with specific types of travelers, Partner Central can help with data for targeting and marketing programs to achieve your goals. For example, if families traveling internationally on their summer holiday are the best guests for you – Property Analytics can identify untapped opportunity in specific countries and our flexible marketing tools make it easy to create a promotion with the dates and terms that are right for your business. Consider packaging rooms with flights from a specific destination, add a free night if guests book a longer stay, or add value by offering free meals or discounted activities for kids.

• Messages
  Congratulations – you’ve captured a booking! It’s time to begin creating a positive guest experience and laying the groundwork for a glowing review. Best practices include quickly sending a note of welcome, asking about arrival times and special occasions, and sharing directions, instructions and local knowledge. Sound overwhelming? Partner Central streamlines this critical step with Messages, a platform for guest communications. You can pre-write your welcome messages (including attachments), schedule them and review responses in one intuitive dashboard.

2. The Trip

Our travel sites (Expedia, Hotels.com, Wotif, Orbitz, Travelocity and more) provide mobile apps to help travelers stay informed and able to easily access their booking information as they make their way to you. Once they arrive, the focus is meeting and exceeding their expectations and ensuring they feel valued. And Partner Central is there to help.

• Real-time feedback
  Check-in sets the tone for the guest’s stay. Get this interaction right and satisfaction is high, getting it wrong can lead to frustration shared in post-stay reviews. Knowing how a guest is feeling and being able to quickly recover is key. A Deloitte study revealed that 40% of hotel guests are more likely to positively promote their stay when a problem was rapidly resolved. Early in their stay, Real-time Feedback automatically reaches out to guests to understand if they’re happy and alerts you to their level of satisfaction, giving you a chance to solve issues or continue to delight.

• The Partner Central app
  To stay up to date on bookings, market conditions and guest requests from anywhere, be sure you have the Partner Central mobile app on your phone. It’s designed to help maximize your time and be incredibly responsive.

3. Post Trip

After guests check out, Expedia Group encourages them to share their experience with other travelers – you can reach out too, via Messages. Once a review is received and verified, Partner Central provides tools to help you manage your online reputation and maximize your guest feedback.

• Post-stay reviews
  Once guest reviews are vetted, you’ll be able to read, manage and maximize them in Partner Central. As a means of shaping the expectations of your future guests, we encourage our partners to respond to every review – emphasizing positive feedback and demonstrating your regard for guests and their comfort in replies to mixed or negative reviews. Your reviews, and your comments, publish as part of your property listing in the Expedia Group marketplace.
  
  
• Guest Review Widget
  We don’t want limit where a traveler can discover and read reviews about your property. Use the Guest Review Widget to display current feedback content, including property rating and guest recommendations, on your property’s website. Badges and awards may also be available.
  
  
• Guest Review Insights
  Common themes in your reviews can be leveraged to improve your guest experience and better highlight the things travelers love most in your marketing. Guest Review Insights transforms the last 12 months of qualitative feedback into structured data that reflects how guests feel about specific amenities and aspects of their stay. This data can then be compared with ratings received by competitors to help you prioritize your next steps.

There’s a richness of additional tools and data in Partner Central; this is just one demonstration of how OTA technologies can be used to support small independent properties in increasingly competitive markets.