• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, October 22, 2024

Hotels are probably ahead of other types of businesses when it comes to personalization. As well they should be — they have to identify guests and cater to their needs in real-time. 

But do all of them have the right platforms for managing guest relationships at scale? A new paper from HotelTechReport, The Ultimate Guide to Hotel CRM & Email Marketing, argues that they need CRM and email marketing software 

For one thing, a good hotel CRM is built on guest profiles. Serving as the central source of truth for data on guests, profiles are sourced from “property management software and any other third party data source within a hotel (e.g. Spa software, online reputation management, F&B etc.),” the paper says. 

Moreover, this must help serve the guest from “booking, to pre-arrival, to on property, to post-stay and finally nurturing to get that guest to come back and stay again,”  and to communicate with guests at every digital touch point.”

Hotel CRMs work best when applied to the highest-value guests — those who frequently stay at the hotel. The hotel must deeply understand those customers and serve them with special offers and custom messaging. 

But let’s step back for a moment. This paper was sponsored by Bookboost, a provider of just such a platform. Bookboost may be right about the need for a good CRM, but it is hardly objective. 

Of course, hotels are not alone in need scalable personalization. The paper cites Salesforce data showing that 62% of growing small and midsize businesses are accelerating technology investments to increase productivity. 

But hotels are at the cutting edge, and this paper shows why they need to be.