When you step into a luxury hotel, perhaps for a destination vacation or long-awaited getaway, you arrive with an expectation for a personalized, memorable, even life-changing experience. Whether your stay is at a wellness retreat, a beach resort, a golf destination, a safari lodge or an exotic location anywhere around the world, you know that hotel staff will treat you like royalty and cater to your every need – making your satisfaction their top priority.
A luxury experience, from pre-stay through post-stay, provides a true “home away from home” atmosphere where a guest’s needs are anticipated before they’re expressed. Luxury hotel brands compete on providing this type of exemplary experience. Done well, guests are often awestruck by how well everyone on staff meets their needs with a pitch-perfect experience. An exclusive private tour offering, a dinner recommendation, a secluded cabana that has been pre-reserved. Every experience is timed perfectly, strikes the right chord and enhances the guest experience without a hint of being overbearing.
Luxury Starts with Data
What separates even an excellent experience from one that is truly exemplary is data. That is, to ensconce each guest in the lap of luxury, brands need to know everything there is to know about a guest, and that knowledge comes from data. To anticipate a guest’s needs, a hotel must know the guest’s preferences and behaviors in addition to a complete transaction and booking history.
Collecting, aggregating and augmenting first-party data into a single view of the guest across all touchpoints, interactions and channels is foundational for providing a guest with a consistent, relevant experience that is independent of which channel the guest engages in (online or offline) or even which property the guest visits in a luxury brand’s portfolio. With an updated single view of the guest that includes all behaviors, preferences, transactions and both an identity graph and a contact graph, a luxury hotel brand is primed to leverage this knowledge to provide a consistent, superior experience.
Unlock a Superior Guest Experience with a Golden Record
When a single view, also known as a Golden Record, is accessible across an organization, everyone who interacts with a guest is working with the identical profile – whether online or offline. A concierge and a reservation agent, a restaurant manager and a website personalization marketer, an events manager and a chatbot – all have the same view of how a customer engages with the brand, in real time. This means that when a guest arrives at a property – whether it’s the guest’s first or 100th stay – the guest not only receives an experience that is perfectly tailored to their individual tastes, but one that is consistent across all interactions. A concierge proactively caters to the guest’s every whim. Housekeeping knows to set the room temperature at 72 degrees. The luxury automobile that will chauffer the guest to her private museum tour is her preferred make and model.
An Impeccable Golden Record and Data Quality
Many luxury hotel brands have trouble exceeding the expectations of their guests because of the limitations of their customer engagement technology. Specifically, they rely on engagement platforms or solutions that often fail to give data quality its due. Some do not store customer data. Others do not build a Golden Record, instead sitting on top of another vendor’s unified profile and performing some basic ETL for downstream activation. Others perhaps perform deterministic exact matching of disparate records or basic de-duplication and call it a day. Along with having data that is not made ready for business use, the siloing of relevant data continues to be a key problem.
Performing data quality processes the moment data is ingested from any source and type of data – first-party, second-party, third-party, batch, streaming, structured, unstructured, semi-structured – is essential to build an accurate, trustworthy Golden Record. Data that is cleansed, enriched and fit for business use the moment it enters the system is needed to ensure that the Golden Record accurately reflects a guest’s journey with the brand in real time.
The use of persistent keys in building a Golden Record is another important element, providing brands with a consistent view of a guest over time despite changing circumstances such as a new device, a new physical or email address, etc. Furthermore, persistent keys are an important component for how an enterprise-grade customer data platform (CDP) approaches householding within the identity resolution process.
Householding is Important for Understanding Contextual Relationships
Householding is the concept of understanding a guest or a customer’s contextual relationships. For a luxury hotel, it could simply mean being able to determine with a high degree of accuracy that when a device is used to book a room, whether the actual guest booked the room or whether someone booked the room on the guest’s behalf. Perhaps the guest’s husband used his wife’s personal computer. Or maybe it was a business associate, a personal assistant or an agent. A Golden Record that is compiled using householding as part of the identity resolution process will include a range of signals that link the device usage to one unified profile over another. A device may be linked to different profiles, and householding is the process that provides that contextual understanding.
For a practical example, imagine a famous footballer arrives for a reservation at an exclusive seaside resort on the Amalfi Coast. Because the Golden Record includes preferences and behaviors, all staff – reception, concierge, maître ď, wait staff, etc. – know the player values discretion and wants to be addressed as “Sir” (or perhaps by an alias) rather than by name, lest it be overheard. Moreover, because householding has been used in resolving a guest’s identity in the creation of the Golden Record, the staff knows that the famous footballer is the arriving guest even though the athlete’s business manager is the person who booked the stay.
Meet Guest Expectations with a Customer Data Platform
The Golden Record is foundational for treating every guest interaction, every moment, as an opportunity for a luxury hotel to further enhance the guest experience. Every luxury hotel aspires to provide an exalted guest experience, and traditionally a top-flight experience is showcased through a highly trained, professional staff as well as unparalleled amenities. An enterprise-grade CDP that provides a deep, contextual understanding of each guest helps luxury hotel brands take personalized experiences to the next level, providing guests with the royal treatment that they expect every time they interact with the brand.
To see how Redpoint can help travel and hospitality companies connect customer data and deliver personalized experiences before, during and post trip with the Redpoint CDP, click here.
