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Is Your CRS-CRM Integration Sabotaging Guest Experiences?

Imagine a guest is excited about their stay at your hotel. They’ve booked a room, expecting a seamless experience. But, behind the scenes, your systems – CRS (Central Reservation System) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) – are barely speaking to each other. The result? Miscommunication, missed opportunities and a frustrated guest who doesn’t feel valued.

This is the reality for many hotels using poorly integrated CRS-CRM systems. When these systems don’t work seamlessly, the cracks start to show. 

Here’s what happens:

1. Fragmented Data:

When your CRS and CRM aren’t natively integrated it means they aren’t connected directly, so can’t share data and communicate with each other. This results in data transfer being delayed, incomplete or outright wrong. And it means your front desk might not have real-time access to a guest’s preferences or loyalty status. The personalized service that guests expect? It gets lost in the shuffle.

2. Missed Upselling and Loyalty Opportunities:

Without seamless integration, hotels miss out on key moments to upsell or offer personalized rewards. Think about it: if your CRM doesn’t immediately tell your CRS that a guest has earned loyalty points or is eligible for a special offer, that opportunity is gone. Your guest ends up feeling like just another booking instead of someone who deserves tailored treatment.

3. Increased Labor and Manual Work:

A poorly integrated CRS-CRM creates more work for your staff. Manual data entry to fill in the gaps becomes a daily burden. Not only is this likely to result in human error, it also takes time away from high-value tasks like engaging with guests or improving operational efficiency.

4. Higher Reliance on OTAs:

When you can’t effectively use your own systems to attract and retain guests, you end up relying on third-party Online Travel Agencies (OTAs). While OTAs bring in bookings, their high commissions eat into your profits, making it harder to run a sustainable operation.

The Solution: Native Integration

A natively integrated CRS-CRM solves these issues by allowing real-time, seamless data sharing. Guests are recognized immediately, their preferences applied automatically and upselling happens effortlessly. Your staff spends less time on manual processes and more time creating unforgettable guest experiences.

More importantly, with native integration, you reduce your reliance on OTAs, driving more direct bookings and lowering your distribution costs. It’s a win for your hotel, and your guests.

In a world where personalization drives loyalty, can your hotel afford not to integrate?

Posted in Industry Trends

Unwrapping Success: SHR 7 Essential Tips for Digital Marketing and CRM During the Holiday Season

For businesses in the hospitality industry the holiday season presents a golden opportunity to connect with customers and boost revenue. Here at SHR, as the leading global specialist technology and service provider to the hotel industry, our gift to you is to offer invaluable insights to navigate the digital marketing landscape and harness the power of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) during this festive period.

Let’s unwrap the key tips to make your holiday marketing campaigns merry and bright.

  1. Create a Festive Content Calendar

One of the foundational steps in a successful holiday marketing strategy is to develop a comprehensive content calendar. This should encompass holiday-themed blog posts, social media content, and email campaigns.

For example, crafting posts like “Top Holiday Activities in Our Area” or “Delicious Seasonal Recipes from Our Chef” adds a personal touch to your brand. By maintaining a consistent and engaging presence throughout the season, your hotel stays top of mind for potential guests.

  1. Countdown to Christmas Email Campaign

Building anticipation is a powerful marketing tool and a creative way to do this is by creating a 12-day countdown to Christmas email campaign. Each email can feature an exclusive holiday offer or experience, showcasing your hotel’s cozy ambiance, festive decorations, and special in-room amenities.

Engaging subject lines, vivid imagery, and compelling calls-to-action (CTAs) will entice recipients to book and increasing bookings.

  1. Mobile Optimization for PPC/Social

Given the prevalence of mobile browsing during the holiday season, it’s crucial to ensure that your ads and landing pages are optimized for mobile devices. Remember users often browse and book on their phones, making mobile optimization essential for maximizing reach and conversions.

  1. Adapt to the Platform

Tailoring campaigns to each platform’s strengths is imperative in digital marketing. We would advise adjusting campaigns based on user behaviors on platforms like Instagram, Google Ads, Facebook, and Demand Gen. Utilizing festive creatives with enticing calls to action ensures that your ads resonate with the unique characteristics of each platform, enhancing their effectiveness.

  1. Holiday-Themed Paid Social Strategies

To capture the attention of potential guests immersed in the holiday spirit, incorporate holiday-themed videos and images into your paid social media strategy. While the lead time for conversion may be longer, this content contributes to audience building, creating a more compelling experience for potential guests.

  1. Maximizing Budget Efficiency with First-Party Data:

In the competitive landscape of holiday advertising, it is important to maximize budget efficiency. Utilizing first-party data to target consumers through lookalike audiences allows hotels to create highly targeted ads that speak directly to specific audiences, reducing waste and ensuring a higher return on investment.

  1. CRM Email Campaigns Aligned with Revenue Management:

This is a time of year to focus on the crucial intersection of CRM and revenue management, as marketing efforts should guide guests to offers that are not only enticing but also available for booking. This strategic alignment ensures a seamless customer journey, from awareness to conversion.

By incorporating our tips into your digital marketing and CRM strategy you should be able to significantly enhance your hotel’s visibility, engagement, and revenue during the holiday season. By embracing festive creativity, platform-specific tactics, and strategic CRM integration, your hotel can create a memorable and profitable holiday experience for both new and returning guests, keeping you always ahead. Unwrap the potential for success this holiday season with our expert guidance.

Posted in Uncategorised

The Drey Hotel Dallas

How SHR played a pivotal role in formulating effective systems and strategies for growth

Pacifica

How SHR’s CRS and CRM paved the way for the Pacifica Perks Loyalty Program

The Hotelier’s Playbook for Integrating Hotel Systems to Maximize Guest Recognition

Learn how vital hotel systems can be interlinked to improve operations, better connect with guests, and provide real loyalty rewards that move the needle on maximizing revenue.

The hotel industry may be welcoming more guests now than pre-pandemic times, but resource limitations and the uncertainty about the trends that will impact the industry going forward remain top of mind. Fortunately, advancements in automation and guest recognition technology have made it easier than ever for hoteliers with less staff to manage operations while exceeding guest expectations.

Hotels are challenged with finding the right technology solution that will help them to improve the guest experience. Hoteliers must consider the capabilities of the technology they are investing in and their partners’ capacity to provide support as well as find new ways to improve their platform over time. Understanding how this technology fits into the working system and the ways in which it can continue to improve process, is really important in alleviating the ‘technology burden’ and allowing hoteliers to focus on what’s important to them; their guests.

In this report, you’ll learn :

  • How automation is helping hoteliers to save time and increase efficiently
  • What questions to ask to properly automate your hotel’s operations
  • How hotel recognize guests in ways that reward loyalty
  • The ways hotel loyalty programs have evolved
  • Why traditional loyalty programs are no longer a necessity today
Posted in Whitepaper

How CRM Technology is Helping Hoteliers Reimagine Guest Recognition and Loyalty

By Allegra Medina, Senior Director – Product

Hotel operators take customer loyalty very seriously, but not every hotelier is in a position to provide a traditional guest loyalty program. These conventional programs require significant overhead to operate efficiently, from training hotel workers to offer and redeem points to maintaining the servers that collect guest information. However, this no longer has  to be the case thanks to modern Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology.

Operators have needed help with the perceived costs and challenges associated with implementing a high-quality loyalty or guest recognition service. Still, today they can use cutting-edge CRM technology to gather the insight they need to reward guests for their bookings. 

Once in place, a high-quality guest recognition program can be automated almost completely, but getting there may require a departure in perspective from the majority of the industry. 

The Basics of Recognition 

There are many advantages to offering guest loyalty programs at your hotel, from creating incentives for travelers to book with you while providing a more enjoyable booking experience for guests once they are on the property. However, few of the trappings of traditional loyalty programs foster loyalty. According to the Harvard Business Review, just 42 percent of brand executives believe their customer loyalty strategies effectively retain consumers’ business. Suppose the hospitality industry wants to begin truly rewarding guests for their bookings. In that case, it must have the courage to break from its fixation on the term “loyalty” and instead focus on guest recognition. 

Providing personal touches that recognize the value of each guest sounds like it may require more operating bandwidth compared to offering a traditional points-based system for guest redemption, but the opposite is often the case. Hotels can use their CRS and CRM data to discern a great deal of insight into guest preferences, booking habits, and aspirations. This knowledge helps hotels align a set value of available perks with the guests who value them. Doing so could manifest in upgraded rooms, complimentary amenities at check-in, or a flat discount on their rate. 

Many of these forms of recognition require little additional effort or investment to execute. Every hotel can recognize guests at check-in, either by name or by offering specific amenities or services based on their past preferences. Delighting a guest with complimentary slippers in the guestroom that are the right size could be the tipping point that leads a traveler to post a positive review. 

These small moments of recognition are far more memorable than earning a reward based on points. These allow hotel guests to feel seen by hotel operators and create a human connection between them and the property. Inviting loyalty members to visit your hotel outlets by offering free F&B credits or complimentary spa services is much more impactful. It speaks to the spirit of hospitality, not having guests plan out points-based redemptions. 

Knowing Your Guests 

Hotels have been diligently collecting guest information to know their guests better, and now is the time to put this knowledge to use or risk losing customers to a brand willing to do so. According to a study from McKinsey, 36 percent of American consumers switched brands during the COVID-19 pandemic, while 62 percent of consumers reported a willingness to spend more money on a brand after signing up for a paid loyalty program.

Hotels can now access guest preferences, requests, and other pertinent information directly on their CRM, allowing them greater freedom to acknowledge loyal members. Doing so may soon become necessary. Experiential travel was up 34 percent over 2019 levels earlier this year, and these trends are expected to increase as the travel market continues to recover rapidly. Hotels with access to modern CRM capabilities can offer different degrees of experiential travel regardless of their property’s location, chain scale, or market segment. Every hotel can understand what their guests desire and find ways to provide it in a way that rewards them. 

These strategies also prompt guests to spend more on property. Loyalty travelers benefitting from a complimentary room upgrade are more likely to visit the hotel restaurant or order room service, and travelers who are given hotel amenities at check-in are likely to buy more before they leave. Most importantly, all these guests are enticed to leave positive reviews for their service. 

Every hotelier wants to be renowned for their service, but if they want to deliver the right size slippers during check-in, that information needs to be provided directly. The most effective systems use machine learning and automation to deliver these insights to the front desk in an actionable and easily understood manner. Such a system allows hotels to offer wide-reaching loyalty capabilities without the minutia of a points-based system, which requires extensive maintenance behind the scenes. Divesting from these programs will enable hoteliers to put down their spreadsheets and focus on improving guest satisfaction. 

Speaking Guests’ Language 

To focus on delivering what guests want and truly reaching guests to foster loyalty, hotels must create clear goals and identify ways to generate revenue. Fostering guest loyalty requires a greater focus on retention rather than conversions or acquisitions, and doing so requires asking the right questions at the outset. 

Does your hotel want to reduce the cost of requiring new guests by making them so happy they want to return? If so, it’s time to refocus your property’s efforts by growing direct bookings through guest recognition. Maybe your hotel can form a marketing partnership with a nearby restaurant or offer airline miles to entice travelers to visit during the off-season. By asking the right questions, your hotel can identify what options are available today and how to strategize for other potential opportunities. 

With a clear goal, hotels can verbalize how they want to increase their revenue. Many of these answers lie in your guests’ preferences. The process starts with learning who your guests are and what they most want during their stay. Answering these questions is the first step toward positively surprising guests and exceeding their expectations, all without the terms and conditions of a traditional loyalty program.

Posted in Industry Trends

How to Approach Your Hotel’s Integration Strategy in the Age of Automation

By Yannis Anastasakis, VP of Solutions & Partners

The hospitality industry is entering a new age of automation allowing operators to refocus their efforts away from costly minutia of repetitive actions, and back on to guests – as long as they can find a way to integrate the necessary systems to do so. Operators have spent recent years attempting to maintain high-quality guest experiences, despite limited available labor and rising consumer expectations, all while keeping pace with the rapid development of new technology. These pressures are leading many hoteliers to rethink their approach to daily operations.

The answer for many of these hotels can be found in automation. Many operators have already embraced technologies capable of automating several functions, such as check-in and check-out, a process that was accelerated in the rush to create a contactless experience.
More recently, others have begun to investigate the potential of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to leverage untapped software and hardware capabilities better manage labor costs and improve operational efficiency.

While the benefits of automation are reasonably clear to hoteliers, the capabilities in question can feel out of reach, especially in markets charged with uncertainty. The next generation of automation in travel is here, and in order for hotels to fully embrace it, they must align themselves with a technology partner who is capable of configuring the desired logic and managing the necessary integrations across a hotel’s technological ecosystem.

Connecting the Dots 

Once upon a time, in the early days of the internet, hoteliers received emails from guests filled with booking information which would then be manually entered into their systems. At the time this activity seemed normal, but today’s operators obviously view it as archaic. Innovations in RPA and other forms of automation will eventually lead operators to feel the same way about our current methods of running hotels. In the most significant ways, we are already there.

In theory, providing guests with high-quality experiences has never been easier than today, thanks to the abundance of information hotels can gain from a variety of sources, not least of which is the guest’s actual booking! However, in practice today’s hotels do not have technology in alignment, and in a way that can accurately and automatically react to a guest’s booking, preferences, and other existing data points. On top of this, these same hotels are often too understaffed to react to these bookings within meaningful time frames.

The practical application of the promise of technology often faces its strongest challenges when ‘connecting the dots’. For example, if a traveler books a stay at a golf resort and has purchased spa or golf packages in the past, what is stopping a hotel from recognizing the guest, and automatically wrapping spa and golf offerings into one package, then automatically delivering it to the guest alongside their confirmation email, or at an opportune time soon thereafter? If a hotel’s Central Reservations System (CRS) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system are capable of sharing information, hotels can consolidate all of these elements into a unified process, resulting in elegant efficiencies for both guests and operators.

We know that combining the capabilities of a hotel’s CRS and CRM, offers hotels a greater capacity to understand guest preferences, market to them, and deliver the stay experience that best fits their wants and needs.

Once integrated, and with the application of a touch of robotic automation, these systems can really push the barriers of what is done today. In our example, they could automatically identify your hotel’s highest-value guests, present new ways to entice them to stay at your hotel, and even present you with an opportunity to completely rethink cancelations through well-timed and ultra-personalized promotions, that speak directly to customers’ needs and specific situations. RPA is allowing hotels to ensure guests are greeted with the correct amenities or services during check-in, respond quickly to room availability inquiries, automatically manage check-in and check-out, handle selling and consumption of vouchers, market directly to guests, set room prices, and so much more; all without hoteliers’ direct input each moment. The greatest barrier to offering these capabilities is finding a technology partner who is capable of taking individual hotel technologies and breaking them out of self-imposed isolation, synthesizing individual functionalities into something that blurs the lines between multiple and single systems – making them work as one.

Asking Tough Questions 

Innovations in automation and operations software have led to a disruption within the hotel industry’s traditional approach to technology. Many of these tools have been naturally separated into departmental silos, given their isolated task-centric and feature-specific nature. Finding ways to bring these walls down will remain a focus for hoteliers in the near future, and should be a priority when speaking with technology partners, all within the framework of a continuing shift away from developing new in-house technology solutions.

While in the past automation seemed like a ‘nice to have’, today we see it as having established itself as a necessity and opportunity for creating competitive advantages and offering genuinely better experiences to guests, sometimes before they have even arrived at the hotel. Acquiring these capabilities is not out of reach! If hoteliers are able to clearly identify their operations and revenue goals, they will find there are many ways to implement automation to help alleviate any inefficiencies. Once these are addressed, they can refocus their efforts on the guest experience, rather than on repetitive tasks that can be managed automatically.

Hoteliers must ask themselves what they could and should do better. After they identify areas for improvement, they should take a close look at their existing and other available technology partners to understand whether or not they provide the necessary quality of integrations to achieve their goals. How do potential technology partners approach the process of integrating new tools and new technologies? What level of support do they provide to hoteliers, and in what form? Additionally, consider the ways they have implemented automation in their properties, and identify how (or if) they continue to refine these capabilities over time.

The end goal for hospitality technology is to make hoteliers’ jobs more manageable and to enable them to refocus on improving the guest experience. Achieving this state today requires a comprehensive technology strategy that includes a focus on sharing information across all hotel departments. Once these digital handshakes are set to take place automatically, operators can be liberated and empowered to do what they do best.

Posted in Industry Trends