Hotel Guest Journey Messages (With Stage-Wise Examples)

What's in it for me?

A useful guide acquainting you with the ample benefits of Guest Messaging in the course of the hotel guest journey.

This guide also introduces you to each of the touch-points (by literally spelling them out for you) giving out stage-wise message templates to enhance (quality) communication and engagement with your hotel guests!

Communication is often regarded as one of the major factors behind facilitating the flow of information and understanding between different people and departments through different media using all the available networks and channels. It holds true for the hospitality sector as well.

The primary aim of every hotelier is to provide every guest a top-notch experience and serve them to the best of their abilities. Paving the way for having clear-cut or transparent communication with the guests, Guest Messaging is a modern-day revolution in the world of interaction. It lets the hotels set the stage for a wonderful guest experience, even before a guest arrives at the hotel with thoughtful hotel guest journey messages at every step.

Guest Journey Mapping

A customer/guest journey map can be regarded as a visual representation of the holistic customer journey (also referred to as the user journey or buyer journey). It helps you tell the story of your customer's experience with your brand across all the touch-points.

It is regarded as the process of creating a customer journey map, a visual story of your customer's interaction with your brand. This exercise is primarily aimed at helping your business step into the shoes of customers/guests and see your business from their perspective. Similarly, a hotel guest journey experience allows you to gain an in-depth insight into common customer issues and hints at how to address them and improve upon them.

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Visualizing The Journey From Your Hotel Guest's Viewpoint

The mental or emotional journey of a guest/customer while booking a hotel or purchasing an experience is often regarded as being on the same level just as making any other purchase decision. This cognitive buying process is what leads the guests to book a particular destination and visualize exactly the kind of experience they had always wanted.

Therefore, it is important for you to understand, anticipate, detect and finally satisfy the guests' requirements in order to enhance the holistic guest experience while simultaneously driving the critical business metrics. That is why the hotel guest journey messages are of utmost importance.

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Importance And Integration Of Guest Messaging For A Remarkable Digital Guest Journey

While anticipating your guests' expectations is a prerequisite, it is important to ensure whether or not your anticipation and their expectations align. To make sure that both of them intersect, there has to be something binding the two. One way of ensuring that is through proper "communication;" the ability to try to know as much as possible about your guests and their expectations, starting from pre-arrival till departure!

Communication is the key to providing a satisfactory and fulfilling experience to the guests. As a hotelier, it is important that you can clearly communicate with guests and other members of staff. Hotels have slowly begun to realize that text messaging is a cost-effective, high-value option to be responsive to the needs of their guests and share important information even before the latter arrives.

Offering texting as a fast and convenient medium for guests to connect with your hotel is is one way of standing out from the crowd and be viewed favorably. In addition to consumers expecting convenience, they’ve also become accustomed to on-demand service. People are more prone to checking a text than an email which is what makes it the most popular way of connecting with someone.

Afterall..

Nearly 80% of consumers prefer to communicate with a business via text, and 90% of text messages are read within 3 minutes of receipt.

How Does Guest Messaging Fit Into Your Hotel Guest Journey Messages?

Guest messaging is a fairly new concept that can primarily be regarded as an amalgamation of two concepts “guest” and “messaging”. It has gained massive popularity over the years and has emerged as one of the most popular methods for hotels to communicate with their guests.

Guest messaging is a hassle-free way of communicating with your guests and providing them a safe and private way of communicating with you. This automated service makes sure that you stay connected with them at all stages of the hotel guest journey, from booking to departure. With only one text, guests can request a special service, ask for a personal concierge, and can even communicate with the hotels after they’ve departed!

This seems to have enhanced the hotel’s productivity by spending less time doing the actual sending and more time communicating. Automating guest messages at your hotel helps in communicating with guests- pre-arrival. on arrival, during the guests' stay, and at departure, taking care of your entire hotel guest journey messages in terms of engaging with the guests.

You can apply the time saved to have more meaningful interaction, thus streamlining staff operations and improving the overall guest experience. The wide array of benefits that guest messaging stands to have has been discussed in the next section.

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The Benefits Of Guest Messaging

As stated above, the majority of people prefer text messaging as a form of communication. In the context of the hospitality industry, the benefits of text messaging have been provided below:

• Helps to personalize guest communication and experience
• Helps to upsell and streamline communication
• Helps improve engagement with guests at every touchpoint
• Allows ascertaining customer opinion and expectations and helps to have straightforward and transparent communication with the guests
• It is a speedy process that decreases the dependency on manpower
• It is something that goes beyond the time-consuming phone calls and widens the communication channels
• It helps to have a straightforward and transparent communication with the guests for understanding their requirements better
• It starts way before the guests’ arrival at your hotel and can be deployed smoothly at all the different stages: Pre-Arrival, Check-in, Mid-Stay, Check-out, and Post-Check-out, thereby leading to a seamless hotel guest journey messages experience.
• It prevents the customers from posting negative reviews to a great extent by allowing convenient engagement, mid-stay feedback, and service recovery
• It makes giving feedback easy for guests during the stay
• It minimizes the chance of messing things up or going wrong in terms of service and guest experience
• It is automated, instant and therefore, less time-consuming

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How Guest Messaging Can Be Optimally Utilized By Hotels

Guest messaging can be utilized by hotels extensively for connecting with the guests and simultaneously providing a memorable guest experience. The element of the hotel guest journey can be broadly divided into the following touch-points:

→ Pre-arrival
→ Check-in & On-arrival
→ Mid-stay
→ Check-out
→ Post Check-out

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Hotel Guest Journey Messages: Templates

1. Text Messaging At Pre-Arrival Stage

Pre-arrival is often the first touchpoint that provides you the opportunity to engage with your guests and provides you an idea about some of their requirements beforehand. In the context of the customer journey mapping, it is usually looked upon as the starting or initial phase that allows you to establish a connection with your guests. It can be further enhanced with the implementation of the following example:

"Hi, Jennifer. Thank you for choosing us. We would like to confirm your reservation at *Arnold World Hotel (hotel name)* between *arrival date* and *departure date*. For more details on your booking, please visit *the URL.* We hope you will enjoy your stay and we look forward to welcoming you!"

a. Booking Confirmation Message

Once a guest books your hotel, you can send them a welcome message confirming their booking status that can be as follows:

"Hi, Ivan, thank you for choosing to stay with us. Your reservation has been confirmed. We are waiting for you on 28th April at 3P.M. Please feel free to connect with us for any queries"

b. Reminder Message

As the reservation date comes nearer, you can also send them reminders. They will surely cherish them:

"Hi, Karla. Hope you are doing fine! This is a gentle reminder to you regarding your booking with us on 28th April at 3 P.M. We look forward to welcoming you!"

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2. Online Check-in Message: How To Check-in Guests In A Hotel

This is one of the most significant steps in the entire process. It is important for you to realize the value of creating a long-lasting impression which can be initiated by having a good first impression.

"Hi, Edward. Thank you so much for booking with us. We look forward to having you here in a few hours We will be sending you info on how to check-in, WiFi details, and other useful details for a delightful stay shortly. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them off!"

a. Welcome Message For Hotel Guest

A welcome message as soon as the guest arrives will surely make their day:

Dear Sasha, welcome to our hotel. Your Wifi is Welcome1. Breakfast is served from 6am to 10 AM. Our happy hours start from 5pm to 11pm. Please feel free to contact us regarding any queries. Enjoy your stay!🪅

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3. Mid-Stay Messaging

A good first impression can only go so far and hence you need to ensure that the guest is served to the best of your abilities. It can be further enhanced with the implementation of the following example:

a. Checking-Up On Your Guests With A Message

In order to assess the impression of your guest, you can send them a feedback message or a survey. This makes the guests feel elated about the fact that you have not really forgotten them even after the check-in.

Dear Alice, we hope you are enjoying your time with us and everything has been in order. Please feel free to text us if you need anything. Again, we would really appreciate it if you take a minute out of the schedule to provide us feedback on your stay so far 💬 This will help us take care of you better!

b. Assisting Your Guests

Hello William, we hope you are enjoying your stay with us. Please feel free to contact us in case you need anything or any information Take care!

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4. Text Messaging At The Check-Out Stage

Your role of providing the best guest experience doesn’t end on departure. However, it can be further enhanced with the implementation of the following example:

a. Goodbye Message

It is time to bid your guests goodbye! So a goodbye message stating your hope to serve them again would be wonderful:

Hi, Brian. Thank you for trusting us with your stay. We hope that your experience with us was great, and everything was in order. We had a great time serving you and we look forward to having you back with us soon. Safe Travels!

b. Feedback/Recommendation Message

You can follow your goodbye message with a polite and subtle request for feedback. It is advisable to keep it natural or else the chances of bothering your guests will increase

👋 Hello George, thank you for staying with us. We hope you enjoyed your time with us and liked our hospitality. We would really appreciate if you could take a minute to provide us your quick feedback on "the URL." 💬 Thank you. See you around soon

c. Extended Stay or Late Check-Out Message

You can also make additional income out of extended stays or late check-outs. For example, you can check the rooms that are supposed to remain vacant for a particular day on the basis of which your staff will be able to provide late check-out or extended stay facility to the guests desiring it the most. This provides you the opportunity to gain an additional income out of that.

Hi, Adele! If you would like to extend your stay until 11:30 AM, we will be happy to accommodate your request with an Extended Check-out Option for $50💵 Since our properties are on Instant Book, this will be required to take place as soon as possible. To secure an extended check-out time, just send us a message here confirming your request for us to coordinate with our housekeeping schedule 🧹and modify the reservation to reflect the additional extended check-out fee.

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Conclusion

The primary aim of any hotel is to provide a seamless and top-notch guest experience which can be achieved by adopting a personalized approach. Hotels and hoteliers have realized the significance of providing a memorable experience to their guests and tools such as hotel guest journey messages enable them a detailed insight into the consumers’ mind and decision-making process. Assimilation of personal human touch and technology is an approach adopted by the hoteliers to enhance the guest experience even further. These technological innovations are incorporated into the core functioning keeping the utmost convenience of guests in their minds, thereby helping the latter reduce dependency on the front desk.

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Connect With Your Guests At All Stages of Their Stay, from Booking, Pre-arrival, Check-in to Check-out and more!

https://guesttouch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/guest-messaging-hotel-guest-journey-messages.mp4

Our refreshingly simple hotel guest messaging will help you connect seamlessly with your guests at every stage, right from pre-arrival to check-out, aka your overall hotel guest journey mapping.

Connect with your potential customers and guests at every stage of the guest journey to boost revenue, and provide a convenient and delightful guest experience.

What’s more?

• Increase your website conversions with website chat bot designed for
hotels.
• Give your website visitors easier access to engage with you and convert more bookings with on-the-go website messaging.
• Speak directly with potential guests or assist them automatically with an AI chatbot, 24/7.
• Welcome each guest with a personalized message and micro-page at the check-in which gives your guests highlights of amenities, special events and upsell possibilities like spa packages, bar hours and more.
• Proactively check-in with guests to assess sentiment mid-stay, promote positive reviews, and correct service failures before departure.
• Easily respond to incoming messages faster, right from desk computer.
• Alerts and notifications ensure that your staff will never miss a message.
• Automated messages and saved templates help you save time.
• Go global and speak to all your customers in their own language.
• Collect feedback and drive more (and better) reviews.

You Name It, We’ve Got It, Try GuestTouch today.