In an increasingly competitive hospitality landscape, website personalization has become a key driver for boosting direct bookings. By adapting the online experience to each visitor’s needs, preferences, and behaviors, hotels can capture attention, build trust, and guide travelers more effectively toward conversion, reducing their reliance on OTAs in the process.
To truly elevate their digital strategy, hotels must embrace personalization not as a one-off feature, but as a unified, cross-device strategy that is seamlessly integrated across both their website and mobile app.
The Case for Mobile App Personalization
Mobile app users represent a hotel’s most valuable audience, and their behavior reflects that. They tend to open the app with a clear intent, whether it’s to check a reservation, search availability, or access a loyalty perk. Unlike desktop visitors, their sessions are typically short and task-focused, making it critical to personalize those key moments for maximum impact. App users are often ready to act, which makes personalization a powerful driver of both conversion and direct revenue.
What’s more, mobile apps make it easier to detect in-stay guests through data layer signals. This enables hotels to trigger highly relevant, real-time campaigns, such as spa offers, late check-out promotions, restaurant upsells, or feedback requests, at exactly the right moment. It’s a unique opportunity to deepen guest engagement and loyalty that’s rarely possible through the website.
By personalizing the in-app experience, hotels can speak directly to each guest’s context and intent, creating a sense of relevance that today’s travelers expect.
In a market where guest expectations are rising and brand differentiation is crucial, app personalization becomes a powerful competitive edge. It allows hoteliers to go beyond generic communication and create meaningful, real-time interactions that build trust and boost conversions. The business impact is clear: personalized app experiences lead to higher direct booking rates, increased revenue from upselling services, and improved guest satisfaction.
In-App Personalization Has Arrived
Proven personalization solutions that have successfully driven direct bookings on hotel websites are now available for native mobile apps, making The Hotels Network (THN) the first in the industry to offer this capability. With this launch, hotel brands can now deliver tailored guest experiences across all devices from a single platform, including desktop web, mobile web, and mobile apps.
With THN now integrated into native apps, hotels can engage travelers with tailored content, messaging, and offers directly within the app experience, increasing the chances of driving direct bookings and guest loyalty.
What’s included? Hotels can now run a variety of personalized formats such as Smart Notes, Layers, Price Comparison, or Reviews Summary on their mobile apps. Advanced targeting capabilities are also supported, enabling brands to segment audiences by behavior, profile, and more.
How Hoteliers Are Personalizing the App Experience
With THN’s flexible formats and precise targeting, hotels can easily craft moments that feel personal, timely, and persuasive. Here are just a few powerful examples:
Member-Only Offer
To boost both loyalty sign-ups and direct bookings, hotels can target logged-in users browsing room options with app-exclusive deals. A personalized layer might be tailored to greet members, reinforcing brand loyalty while encouraging app users to book directly, bypassing OTAs.
In-Stay Upsell Offer
App personalization doesn’t stop once the guest checks in. During the stay, hotels can trigger upsell offers based on guest status and time of day. Imagine a Smart Note appearing mid-afternoon with a limited time offer for spa services, only available to current guests. It’s a subtle yet effective way to drive incremental revenue while enhancing the guest experience.
Last-Minute App-Only Deal
For travelers searching for same-day stays, app-specific offers with urgency can seal the deal. By leveraging mobile behavior and booking windows, hotels showcasing a countdown timer paired with a layer can capture spontaneous bookings that might otherwise be lost to third-party platforms.
Integration without the heavy lifting
Getting started with app personalization is simple. Your hotel’s mobile development team just needs to integrate the THN SDK (Software Development Kit) into your app. It works seamlessly across both iOS and Android and acts as a bridge between your app and THN’s personalization engine, with no need to modify your app’s architecture.
Once integrated, campaigns are managed in THN platform together with desktop campaigns, allowing for a unified personalization experience across desktop, mobile web and app. This means no new tools to learn, no added complexity, just a unified personalization experience across both web and mobile.
Personalization shouldn’t stop at your hotel’s website, and now, it doesn’t have to. With THN, extending your direct channel personalization strategy to your mobile app is not only possible, it’s painless. Whether you’re aiming to drive direct bookings, engage with loyal guests, or simply offer a more relevant experience, app personalization helps you meet your guests at the key moments when they’re ready to act. Discover how to get started with mobile app personalization today.
