3 Reasons Why You Should Be Engaging Your Pre-arrival Guests

The guest journey today is much more complicated than what it was 10 years ago. Traditional guest communication methods are not as effective, rather, a multi-layered approach should be adopted to engage your guests.

In reality, we have noticed that hotels, especially boutique and small chains, are not optimising communications with their guests between the booking confirmation and the day they set foot on the property. Hoteliers are missing out on the opportunity to build a relationship with their guests and are missing out on the opportunity to create upsell opportunities.

Airlines (including budget carriers) are already jumping on this bandwagon to engage their passengers days or even weeks before their flights to upsell seat upgrades or ancillary services.

Here’s why hotels should start engaging their pre-arrival guests:

1. Being Proactive
Most hotels today are still utilising the reactive approach when it comes to guest communication. Proactively engaging your guests prior to their arrival not only makes them feel important but also opens the opportunity for communication and marketing.

2. Upselling
Before your guests arrive in your hotel is the best time to upsell them room upgrades and ancillary services to enhance their stay experience. Guests are in still in the itinerary planning phase and are exploring different experiences for your upcoming holiday. Not leveraging on this opportunity is a loss of potential revenue.

3. Personalisation
Guest experience being the top priority of hotels today, it is increasingly important to know your guests’ preferences beforehand so that you are able to personalise their stay with you. Only by doing so, are you able to create guest loyalty and make these guests your promoters.

So why are hotels not following suit? For boutique or smaller chain hotels, having the resources to do so might be challenging. But the great news is this can be totally automated using KAI – Hotel Upsell Tool. Your marketing/e-commerce team only needs to only set it up once and it will run automatically in the background for you to earn additional upsell revenue.