Create the ultimate guest experience with communication that is just right.
Over the course of a trip, the way you host and communicate with your guests will affect their experience.
Making each trip personalised and unique is hard enough when you have just one guest, so can be nigh on impossible for a property manager with a growing business. To help you, we’ve compiled a series of tips and tricks you can use to categorise your guests and then send the perfect communication.
Part of this involves intuition and measuring the responses you’ve received so far. Guest communication before arrival is an important process and you can read our five step guide to pre-stay communication here.
The key to communication is to know who you are talking to. You need to categorise your guests based on their personalities and what they want to experience while staying in your property. You can create groups of communications that are sent at particular points throughout the trip, to each specific group.
However, there is a basic structure to apply first:
- Pre-arrival confirmation
A short message to confirm their booking, explain the check in process and how to get to your apartment from the airport. Reassurance that there will be no stress or complications later.
- Mid-stay check
A quick message to make sure everything is ok during the stay. Some guests won’t want to complain or ask but have some things they’d like to change if given the chance.
- Thank You email
Quick thank you for staying to round off the trip.
These are the classics – your must-haves. You should then supplement these with other customer specific emails based on what you know about your guest. Here are three common categories of guests that you will recognise time after time.
The Lone Wolf
This guest needs little or no help. They want to find things out for themselves. Messages to this guest are not going be read and may make you seem like an overbearing host. Let this guest know that you’re available if needed, or if they want to ask any questions. But then, just let them get on with their own thing. Having a way for them to discover information as they please and when they please is the best way to operate with this guest.
Have a guide or information they can use themselves. Be available and respond to any questions quickly with some pre-made templates with some more left-field suggestions if required.
The Guide Book Reader
This is the sort of guest that will respond to a few well-timed suggestions. Happy to explore on their own, they won’t hold it against you if you don’t send any tips but one or two will be well appreciated.
Send your most interesting and lesser know suggestions and things to do to this guest. Just one or two emails or messages throughout their stay with some interesting activities or experiences will add a new dimension to their trip.
The Know-Nothing
This guest wants to see it all and wants to get the very best advice. This means your local knowledge will go a long way. Use your knowledge and local expertise to create itineraries for their trip, categorise trips and activities in groups and sections and send them selections to choose from every day.
A daily email with a selection of trips, places to go and things to see, from a real local expert means that this guest doesn’t get overwhelmed and miss out on things.
When you use Vreasy to automate your communications, it is simple to apply these groups and automate communication during the stay. You can choose to send as little or as much information as you need, plus our arrival forms means your guest gives you information about themselves without you having to ask.
The Guest Experience is all about knowing what can make each guest’s trip remarkable for them. This is done by intuitive customer discovery and well-timed communication. If you apply the same communication to every guest you will inevitably miss the mark with some of them. Showing that you understand a little bit about them is all takes.
In our next post, we’ll be giving you a guide to the best communication to send once your guest’s trip has finished.