When it comes to deciding their experiences, the average traveller today is faced with a wide range of options: hotels, entertainment activities, restaurants, and varied food choices. As a result, resorts, restaurants, and hotels are looking forward to an exciting future in the hospitality industry due to interwoven experiences that can ease customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Competition in the travel and hospitality industry is becoming stiffer with every passing day, and companies are keen on finding a new formula for success that seamlessly strikes a balance between virtual and physical worlds, enables employees to deliver extraordinary service in a high-tech setting, and provides an all-round experience at every stage of the visit. Nonetheless, enhanced connectivity, evolving digital worlds within the metaverse, and using cognitive computing with AI are influential to the future of hospitality.
Travellers don’t have to be physically present to experience their destinations of choice, they’d prefer to be there virtually before and after the trip. Through their laptops, smart phones, and connected TVs, a virtual experience gives the traveller a better idea of the available options and a more continuous glimpse of what to expect.
Hospitality Providers will Understand and Cater to Guests’ Feelings
More than ever, it’s easier to know your customer and provide more personalised services. Due to a vastly digital, extended customer journey, along with more advanced loyalty programs, hospitality companies now possess huge amounts of data that can be integrated with AI technology to create insights and design personalised experiences.
These insights can give employees more knowledge, arming them with enough information to deliver top-quality, customised service and anticipate requests. As the frequency of face-to-face interactions start to decrease, giving hospitality staff the necessary tools to deliver “extra-human” service will make the total experience more worthwhile and improve brand visibility.
Hospitality Companies will Share Insight Data with Guests
With guests becoming increasingly anxious about making the correct travel choices and having more information to do so through the use of technology, hospitality providers must be willing to share data to ease the decision-making process with regard to resource deployment and fine-tuning some features to meet the customer’s expectations during their stay.
Moreover, they must be ready to offer a diverse set of services to please the health-, eco-, and ethics-conscious customer, or risk losing patronage to more flexible and thoughtful competitors. To meet these expectations, hospitality providers need to understand the collected data quickly and respond accordingly. Thus, merely deploying Wi-Fi connectivity solutions alone is no longer acceptable.
Resorts, restaurants, and hotels need to be equipped with secure, high-performing, reliable, and automated networks that can enable both current and future digital innovations and provide amazing guest experiences that can surprise and delight, meeting the challenges of today and tomorrow.
Hospitality Venues to Offer Presence-free Possibilities
Over the past year or two at the height of the pandemic, hotels and resorts adopted “contactless” solutions such as ordering via apps, mobile and biometric payment options, and digital check-ins and ticketing, which have proven to be quite popular.
Sooner or later, hospitality companies will have the ability to welcome guests who are not physically present at a resort or hotel, through the use of groundbreaking technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and virtual communities existing in the metaverse to provide presence-free experiences to visitors anywhere on earth.
These experiences will start long before the guest arrives and continue after they leave. “Pretailtainment” – the art of getting a guest in the vacation mood before they arrive at the venue – is now an important element of the extended guest experience.
Consequently, an increasing number of brands are making digital content aimed at engaging and converting prospective guests in the research and exploration stages. Rather than gazing at photos or scanning a menu, someday, guests will no longer decide without having a first-hand experience of the completely interactive, immersive digital opportunity.
As the virtual experience grows to become a non-negotiable forerunner to the main event, companies will start to provide more innovative and personalised pretailtainment experiences. “Post-stay” services can be added for a total guest experience. In place of token gifts or thank-you notes, guests will receive customised digital content to help them re-experience moments from their visit or stay.
Final Thoughts
With the rapid advancement in technological evolution comes the fast-looming future of the hospitality industry. Travellers will always require a high level of well-crafted, personalised, and engaging interactions irrespective of where, when, or how they decide to engage. To meet these demands, hospitality companies need to better interpret collected data swiftly and respond appropriately, and this is more than merely transferring data from one device to the other.
