Travel micro-moments are at the center of a hospitality customer journey. Across all touchpoints, the goal should be to connect with your guests and deliver unforgettable experiences. You want to create individual moments worth capturing and find ways to build connections with guests during each stage of the guest journey.
Hotels can impact guests across the buyer journey – from awareness through consideration to booking. That's why you need to understand the importance of micro-moments. Read on to discover more.
What are micro moments?
Micro-moments are small actions or efforts during the guest journey – a comprehensive experience across different touchpoints.
This relates to the direct interactions guests have with the hotel brand during the purchase process, as well as the broader relationship-building efforts. It's a two-way street where both the hotel and guests shape the overall experience.
Why are micro-moments important in the travel customer journey?
By recognizing and optimizing these efforts, hotels can build stronger relationships with existing and new guests. They can maintain interactions and engagements to foster brand loyalty and advocacy, the part of the buyer journey after the purchase.
Viewing micro-moments as a part of a holistic travel customer journey helps your brand consider every step of the customer journey. Optimizing the experience makes you more effective in the long run.
By viewing it as a series of small actions that lead guests closer to making a purchase, you can find multiple ways to reach customers, which leads to more referrals and word-of-mouth marketing.
Strategies for staying relevant during those micro-moments
The key to nailing the booking and closing the customer journey is to rely on strategies for leveraging every micro-moment.
Identify the moments you want to impact your guests
The hotel guest journey consists of a series of individual micro-moments, so start by identifying where and how you want to impact your guests. Map the customer's journey and choose what kind of communication and actions you'll take each step of the way. There are also ways to automate your hotel guest journey.
Appeal to the emotional rather than rational
Appealing to emotions is an effective way to stay relevant because people are more likely to remember a brand. During the consideration phase, inspire purchase with beautiful images of your property, staff, or local highlights. This keeps you at the front of your potential guest’s minds when it's time for a purchase decision.
Discover hotel guest engagement strategies
Give guests the answers they are looking for
Not all online searches are the same: they're driven by informational, navigational, transactional and commercial intent. Each requires different content to target clients at distinct phases of their commercial journey. This should be part of your SEO strategy to drive organic traffic and give guests the answers they're looking for.
If someone's searching for the best area to stay in a city, you can provide an infographic showing a map and highlights of different city areas. If someone sees your hotel on Instagram and wants to visit your website, you want to make your website SEO-optimized to boost direct bookings.
If guests are in the transactional phase, they're in the final stages. This is when the commercial intent comes in – they'll search Booking.com and other OTAs to find the best prices. Use ads during this phase to feature your lowest price guarantee and drive direct bookings.
Provide different payment options
Now that you did such a great job inspiring guests, it's time to ensure you're offering varied payment options. A scenario where guests enter their card details and find their card is not accepted is far from ideal. They’ll probably abandon the purchase, and you'll lose the booking.
This is why offering flexible payment options is so important. They're part of a smooth booking process, ensuring all the elements are in place when guests make a purchasing decision.
Virtual concierge during the guest stay
When guests finally arrive at their hotel room, they'll want to enact a service request at some point. They could pick up the phone and dial 1 for reception, pop in the elevator to go to the reception, or pull out their phones and use a virtual concierge.
Use a virtual concierge to convert a request into a micro-moment: your guests needed something and were able to reach you quickly and easily through their smartphone. Such efficiency translates to better guest satisfaction, and that could lead to excellent reviews.
Read more about the impact of self-service technology on the hotel guest experience.
Conclusion
By recognizing micro-moments, your hotel can build stronger and longer-lasting relationships with guests. strive to deliver efficient customer support throughout the booking process and invest in advertising and content creation for each phase of the buyer journey. Creating a seamless user journey across all touchpoints drives ongoing engagement and bookings.
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