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It’s no secret that online reviews have a profound impact on hotel bookings. Its a lever that controls your referral rate, online discovery and even how higher you can charge for a room without dropping your occupancy rate [1].
While reviews are not something you control directly, what drives good or bad reviews – a guest’s stay experience at your property – is something you do. In fact a poor guest experience increases the chances guests will post a negative review online which overshadows all the moderate and great guest experiences your team delivered.
While most Property Management Systems (PMS) help you optimise for logistical and operational efficiency, none of them are designed to bring guest delight at the core of your operation’s strategy. They inherently lack a focus on the nuances of delighting guests. Thier core functionality is rooted in systematic processes and data management, not in the emotional intelligence and creative flair required to truly enchant guests.
A PMS typically operates behind the scenes. It’s a tool for the hotel staff, not a touchpoint for guests. While it ensures that the hotel runs smoothly - which indirectly contributes to guest satisfaction - it does not directly engage with guests to create those unique, delightful experiences that lead to great reviews and brand loyalty.
Using only a PMS, guest satisfaction can be an output but never the core of your business strategy – leaving a lot to chance and coincidences.
Guest delight is about creating memorable, personalised experiences — something that transcends operational efficiency. It involves understanding and catering to individual guest preferences, anticipating + fulfilling their needs, and providing the unexpected.
All that, with just the right amount of human touch. Too less leads and guests feeling unattended – too much of it can cause them to feel anxious or invaded of their privacy.
According to a 2022 Oracle report [2] –
73% of people want hotels to offer tech that minimizes contact with the staff and other guests until they demand it.
This is fundamentally why we are building Haven.
Meet Haven
Haven is a guest delight software that will work as your partner to bring guest satisfaction at the core of your business strategy. It comes with an easy to use, powerful CRM.
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Following are the features we have launched in the first iteration of Haven:
- Customise your guest app: Start by creating a customised guest app for your hotel via the Haven CRM. This guest app will be the digital interface your guests will use to explore facility information at your property, place room requests and share instant feedback to the right people in your team who can resolve the matter before it becomes a negative online review. This guest app, true to your branding can be released within a week – saving you a fortune you’d otherwise spend on building this tech from scratch and maintaining it in the long run.
- Secure access on checkin and expiry on checkout: Once your guest app is live, it can be accessed using a QR code and runs on the guest's mobile browser – no download required. The guests can securely login via an OTP, generated in Haven CRM and shared by the front desk. Up to 4 different guests staying in the same room can access the app by sharing the same OTP. This access expires automatically on checkout.
- Showcase facilities and frequently requested property info: Once logged in, guests can now see wi-fi access details, room details, buffet details and all the facilities available at your property with their timings, menu, etc. They even get in-app buffet notifications for the upcoming buffets at the property.
- Gather feedback when it matters the most: Your guest app is designed to gather frequent feedback from guests in a non-confrontational way. Once a guest submits a feedback, your CRM notifies you of the same – giving you an opportunity to address it 1:1, when it matters the most.
- Insights Dashboard: Finally, the CRM has a dashboard giving you important usage metrics around your guest app.
We chose these features as part of the first iteration of Haven because they made sense from a first principles perspective. Not addressing guest grievances on time is one of the top reasons for poor feedback – this iteration of Haven lets you do that simply but effectively.
That, along with building a lasting impression on your guests via a branded, elegant and user friendly guest app can reduce significant volume of calls front desk receives regarding general information.
If you choose to integrate Haven at your property, we will work closely with your team to integrate Haven at your property, provide adequate training to your staff and even helping with guest adoption. We will also be available for Aside from this, our engineering will ensure maximum uptime of the software, take care of your critical integration requirements, ensure adequate application, cloud and data security. It’s all included in your plan.
Beginning Of A Journey Together
We are starting on a mission to enable hotels build a remarkable guest experience that drives revenue. In the coming months, we will be rolling out the following features for our hotel customers:
- Enable guests to place room requests (private dining, toiletries, etc)
- Ability to turn poor feedback to grievance tickets, allot it to team members and track progress on resolution.
- Enable contact less checkin with document collection before the guests arrive.
- Gather final feedback from guests after checkout.
- Create offers and promotions for guests to maximise upsells and overall RevPAC.
- Chatbot for that can interact with guests as a virtual butler.
- Direct booking engine optimised for best rates, embeddable and sharable via a link.
With each feature, your Haven dashboard will be upgraded to show more meaningful metrics that can help your management with making informed decisions and close the service inefficiency gap to optimise guest experience at your property.
With Haven, we are committed to helping hotel management and owners consistently elevate their guest experience by removing existing human limitations through technology.
Through this committment, our entire product and engineering team will work with an open mind along side the hotel industry, understand what our customers' true priorities are and use that knowledge as our north star for future feature development.
If you find this interesting, I invite you to book a free demo to see Haven in action.
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If you wish to share your thoughts, please feel free to write back to “animesh@havenapp.co”
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Footnotes:
[1] A study by Cornell University School of Hotel Administration revealed that if a property sees its review scores go up one point on a five-point scale, it can raise room rates by just over 11% and still maintain the same occupancy or market share.
