Here are a few ways technology is taking hotels and restaurants into a whole new cyberspace of ease and limitless exposure.
Online booking
Online booking is probably the largest revolution in the hospitality industry to date. While a few more traditional travellers and diners still like to pick up the phone and talk to a real person, most are now happy to deal with a faceless shopping cart. From a hotel or restaurant's perspective this is great news. Bookings can be made and confirmed 24 hours a day without the need for costly staff administration. The challenge is to stand out in a virtual world overflowing with sparkly visuals, facilities, food and great offers. Aside from creating a high profile on booking and review sites, hotels and restaurants need to have their own professional, mobile-friendly website with an easy, functional interface.
Customer Relationship Management
Otherwise known as CRM this cloud-based software allows customer contact information and other salient details to be organised in one place and easily accessed. As the name suggests CRM allows hotels and restaurants to analyse individual customer data and build better ongoing relationships.
Automated customer marketing
This is a biggie. Proactive businesses can now keep customer relationships fluid and top-of-mind with regular, automated correspondence based on history. Customers can be sent a personalised email on their birthday with a great offer for their special day. Taking things to a slightly more Big Brother level, any website activity can be monitored and acted upon. If a customer clicks on a particular area of a site or social media page, automated relevant info can be generated and sent to them. While some may consider such technology intrusive, it does allow hotels and restaurants to be very specific in their targeting and respond immediately to a potential demand.
Social media
Love it or hate it, social media is here to stay and where plenty of your customers go to find somewhere to stay or eat. Online hotel and restaurant reviews are a major part of the hospitality 'sell' and Facebook is where you'll find the bulk of them. Network savvy businesses now create enticing pages with plenty of photos of their facilities, food and frivolities, as well as enticing updates.
