Building loyalty in business travelers

Business travelers are usually a very profitable segment for hotels and especially for large hotel groups. They travel frequently, often at short notice, and have their bills paid by the company. Or to put it in other words: they are not very price-sensitive, and they buy often.

There are various segments inside the business traveler category but most share a focus on efficiency. For these travelers, the hotel is a necessity, one piece of larger machinery that has to work well for their trip to be successful. Reliability and efficiency are key.

Convenience matters

For frequent travelers, the hotel is also a refuge from the stress of the trip, a sort of temporary home away from home where they can take a break, talk to their families and get ready for another day of business.

To gain the loyalty of frequent business travelers hotels need to make their life easier, and the best way to achieve this is through smooth communications. If communication is easy and instant, customers will be able to make changes to their bookings, arrange special services, meals, and other things that could ease their stay without adding stress to an already stressful experience.

The challenge, for hotels, is first finding a communication channel that these customers are already using intensively and then having the ability to dedicate enough staff to cover it 24/7.

Technology can help

Finding the right channel is perhaps the easiest part of the problem since modern business people are completely addicted to messaging apps such as WhatsApp, WeChat, or Slack and are using them even more intensively when they are away from the office. Solving the problem of scale and 24/7 availability may seem more challenging but today’s chatbots and AI can do incredible things.

A well-designed chatbot could easily handle things like bookings and modifications directly from a messaging app like WeChat and interface easily with the company’s reservation system. It could also handle many special requests allowing, for example, a client to order room service when they are still on their way to the hotel.
Human operators could also be integrated into the system to handle edge cases that the chatbot cannot cover and could use the same chat to communicate with the client when needed. Chatbots can also easily add new languages to their system enabling them to talk to the customer in their own language.
The possibilities are endless, and we have already mentioned in a previous article how this technology could even be used to augment a concierge service and drive ancillary revenue. To get started, reach out to our team of experts by using the link below.