Booking Engine
The Importance Of Engagement – What It Is And How Does It Affect Your Bookings?
Every hotelier and hospitality marketer wants their offering to be engaging for customers in order to ensure revenue goals and reservation targets are met. However, the ways in which we define and measure engagement through online channels is both an art and a science. If you’re able to understand the importance of engagement and crack how to measure it, ultimately you can use this metric to help your hotel confirm more bookings and even increase the basket value of each booking.
First Things First, What is Engagement?
Pinning the exact factors which define online engagement with your hotel brand down can be a difficult task. A study by TripAdvisor found that common markers of hotel engagement included review quantity and quality, enticing photo and video content, and other factors which provoke booking enquiries and help fuel clicks through to a hotel’s official website and its own booking engine.
Why Does It Matter?
Online engagement and its effect upon hotel bookings and revenue is a key consideration for modern hotel managers. Why? It’s simple, engagement is a measure of interest. According to one study, making a positive impression online really does boost both occupancy and higher rate capacity, which is great news for hoteliers ready to take on the challenges of engaging with their customer base. If you can get your social media fans and email marketing recipients to interact with your content, they are much more likely to check our your hotel website booking engine and become a guest further down the line.
How Can You Improve Your Hotel’s Engagement?
The engagement process doesn’t have to begin and end with the online space. Whilst social media pages and online review portals are both significant aspects of the engagement process, simply providing a more personalised experience for your hotel guests can lay the ground work for a positive review or social media comment as well as more bookings via your hotel website booking engine.
Quick ways to boost engagement:
• A recent study found that hotel guests who were engaged during their stay were some 40% more likely to revisit than those who felt they were left to fend for themselves, so why not indulge in some on-site engagement? Use locational marketing tools to trace social media activity surrounding your hotel. Search for hashtags relevant to your hotel and respond to posts while your customers are still staying with you to provide a truly proactive approach to engagement.
• Highly engaged hotels generate more reviews, and with the continued dominance of online review sites to help influence hotel bookings, hotels with more reviews also generate more revenue. The most highly engaged hotels respond to a baseline of 25% of guest reviews overall, providing a helpful blueprint on how to win guests and continued goodwill.
• While many of today’s younger hotel guests favour digital communication methods, be prepared to engage with your customers online, in person and through your CRM and social media for the best results for each hotel guest segment.
• A recent study found that hotel guests who were engaged during their stay were some 40% more likely to revisit than those who felt they were left to fend for themselves, so why not indulge in some on-site engagement? Use locational marketing tools to trace social media activity surrounding your hotel. Search for hashtags relevant to your hotel and respond to posts while your customers are still staying with you to provide a truly proactive approach to engagement.
• Highly engaged hotels generate more reviews, and with the continued dominance of online review sites to help influence hotel bookings, hotels with more reviews also generate more revenue. The most highly engaged hotels respond to a baseline of 25% of guest reviews overall, providing a helpful blueprint on how to win guests and continued goodwill.
• While many of today’s younger hotel guests favour digital communication methods, be prepared to engage with your customers online, in person and through your CRM and social media for the best results for each hotel guest segment.
