In today’s fast-paced world, travelers expect seamless and efficient shopping experiences during their hotel stays. Thankfully, hotels can leverage AI-driven personalization to elevate their quick-stop storefronts via tailored discounts, enhanced loyalty programs, and by offering a unified shopping experience that meets the ever-increasing demands of their guests. In this exclusive Q&A, Eddie Deyo, Chief Technology Officer at GK Software, explores the transformative potential of AI in creating a frictionless and highly personalized retail environment within hotels.
How have hotel guest expectations changed in recent months/years when it comes to in-person shopping experiences?
The last thing a traveler wants is to be inconvenienced by an inefficient shopping experience as they prepare to explore a new city or wind down from a busy day of activities. Since shopper expectations today are higher than over across service, quality and convenience, it’s now imperative for hotels to offer quick and efficient shopping experiences for their guests.
To make this possible, integration is key. A hotel storefront must allow guests to pay and check out within the store or put their purchase on their room charge, if the hotel allows this. Connecting the store’s POS to the hotel’s POS allows purchases to be made seamlessly and efficiently.
Like many other retail verticals, from foodservice to convenience stores to general retail, loyalty and rewards have become table stakes in the hotel industry as well. Whether driven by business or personal travel, many guests stick to their preferred hotel brands, particularly incentivized by their desire to make use of their points and rewards. Hotels have a great opportunity to extend their loyalty benefits to the shopping experiences they provide.
How can the use of AI improve the hotel shopping experience for guests?
AI is the engine that drives today’s world-class shopping experiences across verticals. Hotel brands already have established loyalty and rewards programs, and they can use the data from these programs to inspire incredibly rewarding shopping experiences for their guests. AI can make use of this expansive data to track customer interactions across touchpoints, establish loyalty tiers and even generate unique campaigns that nurture long-term relationships between the traveler and the hotel brand.
Guests enjoy this style of AI-driven outreach, as it makes them feel like the hotel brand is finely tuned to their unique wants and needs. This elevates the overall experience for the guest and maximizes the lifetime value for the hotel.
How can personalization improve guest loyalty when it comes to the quick-stop storefront?
With the help of AI-driven personalization, hotels can create experiences that meet the unique needs of each guest. For example, if a particular guest regularly picks up a cup of coffee and an energy bar from the lobby storefront on their way out for the day, the hotel can offer targeted discounts on similar items to encourage additional spending.
These offers can be seamlessly integrated within the hotel’s point of sale to ensure that the guest has access to their offers and rewards without any inconvenience. In doing so, the hotel has provided a net benefit to the guest’s morning routine, encouraging the purchase of additional items while providing unique savings that are tailored to them.
Leveraging AI, hotels can foster even greater levels of customer loyalty that encourage visitors to remain loyalty to their preferred hotel brand.
What is the key to effective implementation of AI-driven personalization?
It’s one thing to offer AI-driven personalization, but to maximize the benefits, the whole experience needs to be unified. The hotel’s POS systems, mobile and other touchpoints must all connect with the existing loyalty programs to ensure that unique loyalty offers and rewards can be accessed and redeemed whenever the guest desires to use them, regardless of their location within the hotel.
Additionally, it’s crucial that hotels allow their guests to purchase and pay for items however they wish. With a connected and unified approach, hotels that offer both hospitality and retail functions can offer a diverse range of payment options throughout their operations. Whether it’s giving guests the option to pay for meals and merchandise directly at the table or through a mobile device, a connected approach enables the frictionless, hassle-free experience that modern travelers have come to expect.
