Personalization of the customer experience - from digital marketing and website experience, revenue management and pricing, CRM and loyalty marketing, and on-property guest experience - has become a buzzword at industry conferences, webinars and in the hospitality media. Lately, two schools of thought have emerged in hospitality. Some industry experts, discouraged by privacy acts such as GDPR and CCPA and the complexity of the technology and efforts needed, predict that personalization is dead or dying. Others, encouraged by the advances in next-gen technologies like AI and ML and the increased sophistication of the online travel consumers, firmly believe that personalization is here to stay and the only way to successfully engage, acquire and retain the digitally savvy customers.

So... is personalization dead or alive in hotel digital marketing, website experience, revenue management, CRM and on-property guest experience?

Erik Muñoz
Erik Muñoz
Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) at Lybra.tech

Personalisation isn't dead, but its evolution is far from its final form.  There are pockets of personalisation occurring today during the customer experience, such as; pre-arrival upselling offers; geo-location and guest segmented pricing strategies, to name a couple of popular trends.  Recently a CRM company acquired a revenue management solution (Cendryn > Rainmaker) which is a strong signal (but no guarantee) that the combined technical solution will offer far greater degrees of personalisation.

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