Personalization in the Hotel Industry

Yes, in some cases hotel personalization is “Mrs. O’Brien prefers three extra face clothes in her bathroom when she arrives“ or “Mr. Walters is allergic to feather pillows – foam pillows only“, or “Ms. Adelson has played golf at three of our hotels. Include her in all golf-related promotional emails for Scottish properties.”

Yes, we achieve – occasionally – that “One-to-One” guest awareness and guest service. But much more often, it seems to me, today’s personalization takes the form of a mailing list of 50 million names from which 500,000 names and email addresses are selected because they have taken a Caribbean vacation in the last 10 years.

Personalization is not “One-to-All”, or even “One-to-Many”, rather it is “One-to-Very Few” or even better “One-to-One”. But this ultra-fine focus on specific guests requires two important components. The first is an intent to practice personalization on a very, very specific level. The second is finely-detailed guest data on which to base both marketing and guest recognition decisions.

In this business we encounter a remarkable wealth of guest data, some of which we record and warehouse, a sub-set of which we make accessible, and a small proportion of that sub-set which we consistently access to support our Marketing and Guest Service programs. Most of the encountered data is not recorded, not structured, and not accessed.

It is within our power to know that Mrs. LeBlanc prefers English Breakfast Tea in the morning and that Mr. Quartermain prefers Hendrick’s Gin, with diet tonic and extra lime. At this time, we generally do not record this type of detailed preference and activity information, first in guest folios, and then in centralized guest profiles, and we do not consistently review the profiles for personalization queues.

It is within our power to do “One-to-Very Few” or even better “One-to-One” personalization, but first we have to agree that personalization requires deep details; next we have to collect and organize that data, and then we have to commit to regularly applying the action prompts those data hold. It is possible, and it is personalization.