Technological innovation is transforming business and our lives. And the travel and hospitality industry is on the front lines, looking for ways to deliver meaningful experiences to guests even as their interactions with staff continue to diminish. According to LoyaltyOne Consulting Partner Melissa Fruend, the key to long-term success for hoteliers is personalization - understanding what make great customer experiences, while leveraging new technologies to adapt services and interactions to guests' changing needs and expectations. READ MORE

Many concierges we speak with today fear technology is putting them out of a job. The reality is the right technology will actually safeguard their profession and place them at the center of the guest experience, because guests want and will always want convenient, personalized service. The reason the concierge role is undervalued today is because of the gap in technology between what consumers have on their phones and what concierges use at their desks. The right technology, in contrast, lets concierges provide guests with mobile first communication, personalized, curated hospitality and flawless guest itinerary orchestration. READ MORE

Thanks to enhancements in technology, hotels now have access to more data and intelligence on their guests than ever before. Data is being collected across the customer lifecycle from booking to check-in to loyalty program profile information. With this data, brands are able to recognize guests when they enter their hotel, ensure their room reflects their preferences, send them appropriate content and promotions in line with their profile and lifestyle. It also allows brands to communicate with consumers directly throughout their stay (as well as before and after) in order to ensure that their expectations are met and even exceeded. READ MORE

As personalized hotel services are replaced with technology, it's important to understand and monitor how your brand stacks up in the “blind taste test” of options available to customers. A comparison of the sum of all things customers experience adds up to create your brand's individual rating. These individual brand scorecards will continue to have profound future implications for your business. It could become even harder to address customers' problems or in-the-moment frustrations because there may not be a human present to notice them. How we offer the choices without seeming intrusive or making the customer feel upsold at every turn will be a challenge to address. READ MORE

In the hotel industry, we are so busy talking about selling more rooms, more food and more beverages that we often overlook how effective the channels we use to market these offerings actually are. Many hotels still use outdated and ineffective marketing channels. Mobile applications provide hoteliers with a totally new channel through which they can interact with their guests on a more personal level, which increases guest satisfaction and loyalty as well as hotel revenues. Mobile apps offer countless opportunities to connect with guests that were not possible before the 2008 debut of the App Store on iTunes and subsequent adoption of mobile applications by smartphone users. In the past seven years, mobile app technology has exploded and hotels are set to benefit from it. READ MORE