As the owner of a hospitality business, you’re no doubt juggling a lot of balls. It’s easy to relegate a task like ensuring that your comms processes are as tight as possible to the bottom of your to-do list, but this aspect of your operation is crucial.
Great communication isn’t just the key to making sure that every single one of your guests has a first-class experience, it’s also the secret behind increased staff productivity, better branding, and revenue-enhancing opportunities.
Enhanced Guest Experience
First and foremost, great communication means your guests will enjoy a better experience with you. From the moment they make a booking, you can wow your guests by providing them with personalized information and offers. Subsequently, this allows you to tailor your guests’ stay, taking care of the little details that make a big difference, such as offering an early check-in, ensuring a travel cot is available where relevant, or providing access to conference rooms or workspaces for business guests.
Consistent, effective communication systems help ensure that a guest message or request isn’t missed and that if your guest experiences an issue, this can be resolved quickly. A communication guest app is a great way to manage such a system and can be deployed to unify all the communication channels your hospitality venue uses.
One of the best ways to increase your hospitality business’s revenue is to ensure that the experience you provide to your guests has them making repeat bookings as soon as possible! With a recent survey showing that 82% of people check online reviews before making a reservation, offering a fabulous guest experience is an effective means of securing brand-new bookings, too.
Opportunities to Upsell
Effective communication also gives you many opportunities to offer your guests revenue-boosting upsells and offers! These could be in-house offers, such as room upgrades, discounted spa passes, a welcome tea and cake hamper in-room or services provided by third parties.
In the latter case, this could mean teaming up with local businesses to offer guests, for example, tickets to a relevant attraction at a reduced price or a booking for an activity such as a boat trip or hiking trek.
To make the most of upselling opportunities, it’s vital to contact your visitors at key points during their guest journey and to use what you know about their needs and preferences to tailor these offers for the best chance of success.
Better Staff Productivity
Without great communication processes, your team will not be working productively, significantly affecting your revenue. What does this look like on the ground? If your back office team can’t communicate effectively with the front desk, changes to a guest’s planned arrival time might not always get through – meaning that when this guest arrives, their room isn’t ready, and time needs to be spent sorting out the issue. Or you have frequent incidents where work is duplicated, with one team not knowing that another has already completed a task.
Manage this situation by going back to basics. Ensure that every member of staff is fully aware of their role and responsibilities, how their work impacts the team as a whole, and the role of other team members.
A central communication hub, as mentioned above, is a great way to centralize both guest and staff communications, meaning that everyone is aware of what needs to be done and when. You may also wish to consider introducing walkie-talkies for staff members to allow for instant communication when necessary.
Promotes Brand Building
Consistently-styled communication is an effective way to build your brand and help spread awareness of the services and amenities your establishment offers. To this end, make sure your business logo, color scheme, font, and any other motifs reflect your brand ethos. This branding should appear on all your communications, either as a letterhead or an email signature and on your social media pages.
A great logo makes a good first impression and can help a business stick in the mind of potential consumers and guests. Plus, research has shown that an effective logo promotes brand loyalty and trust, so using it as much as possible has many benefits!
How to Improve Communication in Your Hospitality Business
Now we’ve explored exactly why it’s so important to get communication right in your hospitality venue, let’s look at some ways to do so.
- Introduce software, such as a guest communication platform
- Ensure that all staff members understand their roles and responsibilities, and those of their colleagues
- Deploy training to boost employee communication skills
- Hold regular staff meetings
- Get regular feedback, both from guests and staff, to continually improve communications processes.
- Be aware of the need for inclusive language, such as offering menus and other information in large print or ensuring that a guest who lip reads is able to clearly see the face of the member of staff they’re communicating with.
Boosting Better Communication: The Takeaway
Ensuring that communication within your hospitality venue is optimal can increase your revenue by making repeat reservations much more likely, and giving you plenty of opportunities to upsell services and offer lucrative upgrades. On top of this, better communication will make your entire operation run more efficiently, thereby saving money, too!
