Guest Messaging is an emerging trend that stitches together an omnichannel Guest Journey

If there is a silver lining from the Covid-19 crisis, it’s that businesses adopted contactless services out of necessity, which in turn has brought them up to speed with changing consumer preferences. But contactless is also helping hotels elevate the service experience as well, opening the door to interact with customers in a more seamless, consistent, and personalized fashion over the course of their hotel stay.

Due to social distancing requirements, understaffed hotels, and automated check-in procedures, it’s possible for guests to occasionally feel like they’re “on their own”. This has created a situation where the hotel experience can sometimes feel disconnected: one off requests might be lost or forgotten, important property details might not be easily accessible when they’re needed, or preferences of past guests may not be remembered when they return.

Thankfully, contactless services offer hotels a lifeline, enabling staff to seamlessly link together many of the disparate details of the hotel experience—whether that’s check-in, concierge services, housekeeping, or room service—using guest messaging. These??messaging platforms help deliver consistent, customized, interactions that blend together the offline and online hotel experience in a user friendly way.

The reality of today’s customer experience is that it happens across a variety of channels. It is also found that consumers interacted with businesses using a variety of channels, with significant uptake across mobile apps, text, voice, and email. Just over one-third used mobile apps (34 percent of all consumers) vs. 28 percent using text messaging. Another 20 percent coordinated contactless services via phone and 18 percent did so through email.

But even as this proliferation of interaction options creates more choice for hotel guests, it also makes it harder for hotels to deliver consistent service. If a customer was to make a request using a mobile app, for example, a customer service agent that emailed with the customer might not be aware of the guest’s previous communications. That’s why there needs to be a single point of contact: it helps connect together isolated interactions into a consistent experience, and allows them to feel “seamless.” This increasingly popular concept is often referred to as “omnichannel.”

“A true omnichannel experience is interconnected and seamless throughout the entire customer journey,” This idea of stitching together the guest journey is so powerful because that’s exactly what’s happening. Conversations go on pause and then pick back up again. It’s literally stitched together, rather than broken up into isolated moments with no context.

Increasingly, customers and hotel executives are relying on messaging to deliver the seamless customer experience that today’s guest wants. After all, messaging is already widely popular with consumers. According to one of the study, 80% of customers think it’s easier to communicate via text or mobile app for contactless service, and 62% of consumers said they’d communicate with businesses more if they could text message with them. And from the businesses’ standpoint, this is a huge advantage as well. As Gartner reports, texting has an open rate of 98 percent, ensuring key communications are seen. Furthermore, a Flowroute study found that consumers read 82 percent of texts from businesses in the first five minutes after receiving them.

After 2021 many hotel owners are turning to messaging to streamline the hotel experience for guests, starting before they arrive on site and continuing until after they leave the property.

“The guest messaging platform allows guests to start communicating with us earlier than they would have normally done so.It is also found even prior to Covid, a lot of times it was hard to manage requests that would come in through our own lodging management system. Now Hotels are able to set a message up a couple of days before arrival to let them know something about what’s going on around the property, or the same day of arrival and try to get that request down.”

And once travelers arrive at the property, other executives note that contactless messaging helps them further streamline and simplify the process of sending and receiving requests.

“Once they’re in the hotel, guests appreciate the speed and the ease of a text platform, as opposed to them dialing the phone, going through the menu on our ground control, choosing a number, waiting for somebody to pick up, and then communicating that message. “This is more direct. Hotels already know who the guest is, what room they are in, and they can just go ahead and tell hotels what they need. And it’s a simple text back, like, ‘Sure, no problem. We’ll go ahead and take care of that.’

Customers also benefit greatly from contactless when it centralizes information and ordering for amenities like room service. In the past, a guest might need to search their room for a physical menu (or maybe call the front desk, or wait for someone to physically bring it to them). Then the guest would have to call in their order. Depending on demand, the line might be busy. Once they finally get through and make the order, then they need to wait for their food, with little sense of when it might arrive.

Regardless of the nature of the request, whether its room service, a question, or a request for assistance, contactless guest messaging makes it the perfect opportunity to reduce friction from the entire hotel experience, from start to finish. “By staying connected and available for two-way conversation, in the moments that matter, hotels can inform, support and engage staff and guests at scale and create safe and contactless guest experiences,”