What Are My Guest Preferences?

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GHN Perspectives: Bernard Ellis
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Bernard Ellis, CHTP, CRME
Vice President of Industry Strategy
Infor Hospitality
What Are My Guest Preferences? That’s for Me to Know…
Last week the time came for me to have deep-dive design meetings with product
management from the leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system
provider we acquired some months back. The task at hand: figuring out what must be
done to create a “CRM Hospitality Edition.” As most of you would probably agree, one
of the most laborious aspects of our “common sense” industry is explaining how it really
works to an outsider, assuming he or she is interested enough to completely hear you
out of course. We were there to talk about guests, but they wanted to know who else
influences a travel purchase? Who else’s preferences need to be accommodated?
Who gets paid and how? What are the touch points? Who are the stakeholders? My
new CRM colleagues did a great job of peppering me with all of these questions and
more, such as, by the way, who buys and uses the systems? As you can probably
imagine, many dry-erase markers became dried-out markers as we mapped out the
relationships between brands, management companies, owners, travel agents – both
on-line and traditional, wholesalers, companies, company travel managers, travel
management companies, consortia, meeting planners, meeting procurers, CVBs,
DMCs, not to mention their RFPs. By the end, they could distinguish a time-share from
a share-with, a meta-search from a mega-brand, a THISCO from a HelmsBriscoe.
But what about guests? It doesn’t seem like very many of them really get to make their
own travel decisions, so does the industry really bother to track their individual
preferences? Blushing, I said, “Yes, of course they do, in some segments it’s the only
differentiator they have left.” We reviewed how guest details and preferences are
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captured when people join frequent stay programs, and how they are mapped to
specific properties’ ability to accommodate that preference, to the code that corresponds
to the preference, to the code for the department that is responsible for accommodating
the preference, magically landing on a departmental arrivals report, or someone’s tablet
or other mobile device. “Whose?” they asked. Here’s where I started to blush again.
The answer was usually an hourly housekeeping employee, who was hustling to clean
almost twenty rooms a day, or a front desk clerk, who may have upwards of 100
expected arrivals to handle. Well, they asked, the guest stay must be a gold mine for
collecting more data on what guests like—whose job is it to do that—to add that
knowledge back to the database? Blushing deeper, I convey that it’s that same
housekeeper, front desk clerk, or add to the fold a tipped coffee shop server or
bartender. And, assuming they had the time, and cared enough to take the time, where
would these different employees enter the information? Out came another box of dry
erase markers.
And what are some examples of what kind of preferences are tracked? I recounted the
usuals that are brought up during system presentations: what kind of scotch or wine a
guest likes, what his favorite newspaper is, what kind of pillow he likes, whether he likes
to be near the elevator, far from the elevator, near the ice machine, far from the ice
machine, high floor, low floor, and my favorite: quiet room, as distinguished from those
guests who prefer a noisy room? A dialogue duly ensued on the difference between
complaint avoidance and “surprise and delight.” What if I don’t want scotch this time?
Don’t most people travel to experience new things anyway? Not the business traveler?
But haven’t we established he usually doesn’t get to pick where he stays anyway?
Well, they said, at least it should be good for getting someone’s peanut allergy or need
to keep kosher all the way into the restaurant systems, right? I started blushing again.
Oh, they don’t ask for a guest’s room number or name until the end of the meal? Oops.
Isn’t it too late by then? “Wait, they do in Europe, in the morning!” I grasped. Oh, they
just check you off a pre-printed list to make sure you’re not trying to scam them out of
multiple breakfasts? I see. And all those room preferences—the front desk system (the
PMS, chuckle, as you call it?) can auto-magically assign a room that meets them all,
correct? Well, yes, unless such a room doesn’t actually exist, at least not one that’s
clean and ready right now. Front desk clerk solution: clear out all the preference codes
to get some rooms to choose from. My new colleagues shared tales of being told
“we’ve pre-assigned you a room, but I’m sorry it’s not ready yet.” So, I translated,
please step aside and let me register the next guest, who gets to have a room now
because he didn’t express so many preferences, or the channel he booked through
stripped out the information that would have allowed us to identify them. What?!? Yes,
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we have distribution channels who limit the amount of guest information they pass
along, so they can “own the customer” until the very last minute. Our job as
technologists is to help the hotel figure out if this guest has actually been there before.
Oh, they quipped, so we can get the preferences onto that harried housekeeper’s
report, or the front desk arrivals report, so the guest can wait longer for his room than
Mr. Anonymous does? For a moment my face took on a different hue of red. How dare
these guys take pot shots at my career-long industry? How dare they be so right?
To my five-star hotel customers, yes, I know you know how to do this for your best of
customers and your highest of rollers. Please don’t send me hate mail. But what if they
booked through an OTA because, gasp, it was easier for them, or what if their booking
came to you via a channel whose ability to strip guests of their identity is rivaled only by
a witness protection program: the group rooming list? Please use that as your guide to
understand the masses with which other segments of the industry must deal.
My new CRM colleagues and I then talked about the need to not only upload stay
details back to the guest profile, but detailed records of their “incidents.” What problems
had they had? What had they complained about? “Well,” they asked, “can’t these
incidents include not just bad things, but things they simply asked for?” They can and
they do, I replied. Eureka! The $8/hour housekeeper doesn’t need to enter the fact that
I like extra pillows! The system can figure that out! And the engineer doesn’t need to
enter the fact that I like light bulbs that light, and toilets that flush properly, and the desk
doesn’t need to enter that I like to leave on 5AM shuttles to the airport. Oh, wait, I
guess there are some details there, discerning “incidents” versus preferences, aren’t
there?
So what’s the answer? Two clues. Clue Number 1: I recently upgraded my cable
television solution. (I was paying so much money that I finally looked into why I don’t
have what those lucky families in the commercials have. Answer: I simply hadn’t asked
for it.) During setup, I identified the programs I wanted it to record on the DVR. It
knows my zip code, and what I watch live. Perhaps it factors in the curious fact that I’m
willing to pay more for cable every month than some probably pay in alimony, yet I’m
seldom home to watch it. The result? A menu called “For You,” a curated list of
programs that include a mixture of what I asked for, what it thinks I should have asked
for, and the top programs that everyone else is asking for. Yes, some DVR’s have been
making suggestions for years, but this list is more relevant and helpful than I have ever
seen. Even more pertinent: it offers me the ability to download content off-line to carry
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into that arid desert out there, that land where no one knows what I like to watch, that
land called: your hotels!
Clue #2: I also took a free trial to a music subscription service that was offered during a
recent smartphone upgrade. It could see what music I had imported from the old
device, and hadn’t lost the breadcrumb trail of what I had played most recently or
frequently. While its initial attempt to guard my own music in the cloud, away from my
listening ears when on a plane or roaming internationally, left me far from pleased, it
won me back with its menu item entitled, you guessed it, “For You.” Better than any
past “genius” listing, this service has suggested music to which I truly appreciate being
exposed. For instance, it saw Enrique Iglesias—and thought I might like Julio Iglesias.
Really? His father? Didn’t he mainly croon to leagues of lonely housewives, back when
there still were leagues of housewives, lonely or not? Well, in fact I was one click away
from being melodically taken on a very pleasant trip back to my youth. Finally, someone
had figured out Generation X! My waning interest in music has continued to rebuild.
So, what am I getting at? We need to stop relying on guests to tell us what their
preferences are—they probably stopped bothering to spend much time filling out the
form long ago, after they saw that it didn’t make much difference. We need to stop
relying on hourly employees to add to a data store on guest preferences—they are too
busy, and by the way, what’s in it for them? We need to stop perpetuating the fiction of
the pre-assigned room that has all the guest’s preferences ready and waiting—unless
you know exactly when they are arriving, it’s actually a pretty inefficient way to run a
busy rooms division. Instead, what we need to do is give the guest experience its own
“For You” menu. Based on the past data we have about what this guest has reserved,
bought, eaten, drank, played, toured, seen, requested, changed to, complained about,
and not just to us, but even out on social media, let’s use technology to suggest an
experience to the guest that won’t assume he wants the same thing all the time, but
makes an educated guess at what he will welcome to broaden his horizons, that will
consider his interests, but operate within the constraints of what is actually available,
that will alert him to what crucial items must be pre-reserved, but let operators
accommodate less crucial (and less lucrative) ones on the fly, based on what is
available at the moment. It’s especially important that we get good at the latter,
because if data privacy laws continue on their current trajectory, the only guest data
we’ll get to see is what they bring with them on their devices, and let us use “Just For
Them.”
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Infor is a long-standing member of GlobalHotelNetwork.com and
GHN’s Technology Committee.
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