Trends in Hospitality: Travelers are Seeking a More Personalized Experience
Embracing trends
We love hospitality: an industry that continues to keep evolving. As it is constantly bringing in new trends and ideas, we are excited to see where it will take us next. Let’s dive into two noteworthy trends!
1: Prioritize Health and Wellness
Holidays are getting more and more wellness focused. The past few years have shifted the expectations and raised a new consciousness of how travelers value both their physical and mental health. Travelers are expecting hotels and resorts to accommodate their changing needs: prioritizing health on their holidays.
This has driven an increased demand for organic food offering, yoga & other exercise classes on-site and even detox & retreat packages. Wellness tourism is expected to grow even more by 2025. What kind of health- and wellness services can your hotel or resort offer? You might have beautiful outside facilities like a garden or a rooftop perfect for yoga classes. Or you can invite your guests to a healthy cooking class based on seasonal veggies. And one of our favorites offer more art related activities to boost your guests creativity such as pottery baking or flower arrangement events.
No space or time? Consider a partnership with local businesses to curate these experiences for your guests.
2: The Digital Guest Experience
The guest journey has experienced quite the transformation over the past years where today, many critical steps of the journey happen online. How do you cater to modern day travelers' needs without losing the human connection?
Keeping in mind that travelers are now more and more seeking personalized experiences, embracing technical developments that enhance your guests’ stay is key. However taking your online presence seriously while maintaining the human connection can be quite challenging. For example, contactless services such as mobile check-ins simplify the guest experience by reducing the wait time. But at the same time, an important moment of personal contact is lost. So what would fit your values best?
A solution could be to consider an UX-friendly app or communication via any other preferred app, so your guests feel connected and seen by you during their stay. Guests can then also share their preferences, so you can adjust your services according to their wishes.
Personalizing your Guests’ Stay
So how could we combine these two trends: prioritizing Health & Wellness in combination with a Digital Guest Experience? We believe one way is to use it for personalizing your guests’ stay to their unique wishes. Technology can be of assistance for getting to know your guests before they even have arrived and tailor your service to their wishes resulting in lasting loyalty. It could be about knowing whether your guests would like to be accompanied through their check-in or not, what kind of health activities they would be interested in, tailoring F&B options and even asking for their temperature preferences in their rooms. We read about one hotel in Paris where guests can suggest their food portion sizes! This hyper-personalization also results in better price strategies for hotels and less waste. It shows how in hospitality we can focus on the individual, making guests feel more seen and heard.
What are your thoughts? Have you been making any changes regarding these two trends in the past years? We are curious to hear and learn together with you!
