HOW TO IMPROVE THE GUEST WELLBEING EXPERIENCE JOURNEY

This is an excerpt from our Hospitality e-book that we enriched with recent data around current industry trends. We hope you enjoy the read. If you want to get more complimentary content, you’ll find a download link for the full e-book at the bottom of this page.

Executive summary

• Lockdown and covid restrictions during past years have contributed to a shift in lifestyles and flexibilization of work models.
• Mental and physical wellbeing are more of a personal priority than ever before, and this is expected to stay.
• This multidimensional trend influences multiple facets of day-to-day life, travel included.
• A thorough understanding of guest behaviour is key in adjusting to trends that are here for the long term.
• Learnings from guest research must be translated into a solid feedback process in order to help your organisation learn and thrive.

Developments of recent years have in some ways given people more control over aspects of their lives, through changes such as increased working from home, home shopping deliveries, and home cooking. Wellbeing is no exception. People have been able to carefully curate their own wellbeing experiences at home and now expect to be able to do the same when travelling.

Wellbeing comprises a personal process, not a series of isolated actions. To give your guests a great hotel experience, you have to become part of this process.

Knowing how a guest behaves from the moment they leave home to the moment they arrive at the hotel will help you understand what they need and expect from you. Understanding the hotel guest experience journey fully is crucial to improving your wellbeing offer.

Here’s what you can do in order to get a better understanding of your guests’ profiles and their needs:

• Retrospective data mining: take a look at your booking data and try to extract information that helps you to cluster past bookings based on personal factors like age, duration of the stay, purpose of the stay, solo travel versus travel with family or friends or similar.
• Review your reviews: analysing your reviews can help to add additional context to the findings of step 1 and to further expand on your guest profiles.
• Revert back to the data: take another look at your systems to analyse the booking and/or usage of added value services you are currently offering. Does the data fit the assumptions you made when clustering your guest personas in steps 1 and 2? Do you find any outliers? Note those down, as they will help to retrieve the right information from guest surveys going forward.
• Build your hypothesis: You should have a good idea of your various guest profiles now. Time to validate. Note down which assumptions you’ve made and where data raised questions. Now transfer those findings into a guest survey.

A thought-through guest survey that is implemented as a part of your standard procedures will help you to get meaningful insights from day-to-day business and to make data driven investment choices. This can range anywhere from knowing whether you need to have kit available at reception for guests who forget theirs, which type of fitness solution is in demand, whether your guests are likely to need guidance pre- and post-workout, or whether they would prefer to do their own thing. It can also cover things such as understanding whether or not they demand or appreciate guidance on healthy eating, walking routes, or room-based activities. Knowing your demographic is essential.

Here's the key to successful data collection and analysis: process and clear ownership.

Consider creating a solid feedback process to get a better understanding of the hotel guest experience. Only by committing to a process with all its internal and external implications, will you get to grips with your guests’ pain and pleasure points and ensure you address them for their next stay in your hotel.

Implementation

Getting internal and external implementation right is crucial.

All staff members should be clear on the overall wellbeing journey the property is working towards, the purpose of the fitness solution – like a gym or in-room fitness – that you offer, and the principal benefits to guests. Of course, if the emphasis is on a good customer journey, then the experience will be smoother for everyone.

Things to consider:

• Assign ownerships and clear responsibilities, appoint at least one person in your organisation to be the data owner.
• Introduce standard operating procedures that also cover data collection. 
• Set time aside to discuss data insights with your data owner on a monthly basis.
• Make sure to feedback results to your staff – involvement is a lever of successful learning organisations that must not be underestimated.

Again, knowing your guest profile inside out will determine where, when and how to offer this. For example, is privacy paramount to a major part of your guests? If so, in-room fitness might be a solution to address this need. Are you using hotel guest experience software or guest experience hospitality apps to ensure you’re delivering a good customer journey? Make sure to use them in a smart way! The communication process starts long before the guests arrive. This ‘fitness-onboarding’ helps to prime your guests for a great wellbeing experience.

Finally make sure to use the tools you have to collect all the relevant feedback on the wellbeing experience, as well as the facilities, during and after the stay of your guests. This can include, but is not limited to, the below questions – again: having the right data and guest profiles at hand, will help you to determine the right questions:

• How did they feel during their stay?
• What were the main sticking points?
• How did they find the fitness space?
• Did the restaurant deliver food that enhanced the experience?
• Anything they missed or would have wished for?

Do you want to learn more? Download the Hospitality e-book [insert hyperlink] to get more insights into how you can create a delightful wellbeing experience, how it will help you to generate repeat bookings and increase RevPAR.

Wellbeing experiences that delight your guests

As the fitness industry’s largest supplier of commercial equipment, Life Fitness draws upon its many years of experience to help customers create bespoke wellbeing offerings. Whether it’s adapting an existing space, launching a new gym, or providing in-room solutions, Life Fitness manages the process from start to finish; from equipment selection and layout, through to staff training and customer communications, the team can support the entire consumer journey.

We are here to help: our Hospitality experts are looking forward to hearing from you!