Why Your Hotel Should Use Mobile Concierge
A traditional hotel concierge plays an important role by performing a variety of tasks that enhance the guest experience. A concierge makes restaurant recommendations and books reservations, secures tickets for events, provides directions, schedules spa appointments, shares information on local nightlife spots, arranges airport transfers, and more. And for hotels without a dedicated concierge – these tasks often fall on your frontline workers to juggle on top of their other duties, a real challenge with hospitality’s persistent staffing shortages.
By adding mobile concierge functionality through your hotel app, guests can easily access all the services of a concierge in a more convenient way. Actually, in a preferred way!
A Google and Phocuswright survey found that 70 percent of travelers “always” use their mobile devices when traveling – and they consider their smartphones to be the new concierge – frequently using them to research activities and attractions, locate restaurants, and shopping, or look up directions. In addition to benefitting the guest experience, implementing mobile concierge in your app provides competitive advantages and opportunities for hotels.
Optimize Operational Efficiency
With strategic content selection and user-friendly navigation, the mobile concierge feature helps you optimize operational efficiency by providing answers to guest questions directly in the app. Mobile concierge offers your guests instant access to a large database of information, including maps, phone numbers, schedules, and info on hotel amenities, along with the ability to request in-room services, make reservations, and place orders themselves – precisely the types of self-service your guests are looking for. Mobile concierge even goes beyond traditional concierge services, offering 24/7 availability and placing information such as flight statuses at guests’ fingertips.
Drive Additional Revenue
Mobile concierge serves as a powerful marketing tool that benefits your bottom line. An app gives you access to actionable first-party data, such as guest preferences and shopping behavior. You can then promote services, upsell and cross-sell in a more natural way. By customizing your promotions of in-house amenities and offers, you have a higher probability of engagement – driving more spend per room by providing a more personalized guest experience. You can also highlight local attractions, entertainment venues, and businesses that you partner with, removing barriers to sales by allowing guests to make bookings directly within the app. You can even drive future direct bookings by offering guests a discount if they book their next reservation through the mobile concierge.
Reduce Human Error
Mobile concierge technology virtually eliminates the chance that guest requests fall through the cracks, and it’s especially helpful when a request involves multiple departments. For example, a guest may contact a concierge to arrange a golf tee time in the morning, a spa appointment in the afternoon, and dinner reservations for that evening. This would normally require multiple phone calls between the guest, concierge, and different team members. With mobile concierge, the guest can see all services and options, ensuring everything is booked exactly as they wish with a few swipes of their fingertip. The technology also allows you to monitor efficiency metrics, such as how quickly staff members respond to requests, helping you improve staff performance, systems, and processes.
Save on Human Resources
Everyone in hospitality is well aware of the persistent labor crisis. A recent survey revealed that half of former hospitality workers won’t return to their previous job, and one in three say they aren’t even considering a hospitality job for their next position. Innovative mobile concierge is incredibly flexible, handling the work of several employees. It eases over-reliance on team members and allows hotels to reduce their staffing needs while simultaneously improving the overall guest experience.
Achieve Employee (and guest!) Satisfaction
In conjunction with operating more smoothly with less staff, utilizing mobile concierge also leads to greater employee satisfaction. This technology gives guests the tools they need to educate themselves and handle simple requests. As a result, your staff can spend less time on logistics and repetitive tasks, and more time building genuine relationships with guests. Mobile concierge helps elevate your front-of-house staff into more of a brand ambassador role. They can spend time delivering those nuanced guest services where a personal touch provides a clear added value. This role transformation creates a more rewarding environment for team members, resulting in lower turnover, reduced hiring costs, happier staff, and thus, happier guests.
Interested in experiencing all the advantages of mobile concierge at your hotel?
Sources:
[1] How Smartphone Usage Is Shaping Travel Decisions - Think with Google. Think With Google, Feb. 2018, https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/consumer-travel-smartphone-usage/.
[2] Weir, Luis. “Integration Is the Key to Accelerating Innovations for a Changed Marketplace.” Integration Is the Key to Accelerating Innovations for a Changed Marketplace – HITEC Bytes - Special Report, 27 Oct. 2020, https://specialreport.hitec.org/details/122000115.html.
[3] Q2 2021 United States Job Market Report.” Joblist, 8 July 2021, https://www.joblist.com/jobs-reports/q2-2021-united-states-job-market-report.