Guest Communication Tips in a COVID World
Summary
This article from Get Paid For Your Pad discusses adapting guest communication in the COVID-19 era, focusing on building personal connections and addressing traveler anxieties. Hosts should use digital guidebooks, incorporate video content, and automate welcome emails while still personalizing communications for a better guest experience.
Key Insights
- •Travelers have more anxiety right now, and there is a strong need for STR hosts to communicate clearly and be responsive to our guests’ questions and concerns.
- •The top takeaways from Hostfully’s 2020 Hospitality Report included that the use of digital guidebooks more than doubled, 55% of hosts expect less revenue than 2019, and direct bookings are up by more than 25%.
Action Items
- ✓Consider incorporating video content into your guidebooks, such as welcome messages, how-to videos, home tours, and videos of the local area.Effort: mediumImpact: medium
- ✓Balance personalization and automation by sending automated confirmation emails, asking a question in an automated welcome email, sending a personal note in response to the question, resending a welcome email five hours prior to arrival, and checking in with an automated message one day into the trip.Effort: lowImpact: medium
Tools & Resources
- →Get Paid for Your Pad: On this episode of Get Paid for Your Pad, David joins me to discuss the importance of guest communication in a COVID world, explaining what questions travelers are asking right now and how their habits have changed through the pandemic.
- →Hostfully: David Jacoby is the Cofounder and President of Hostfully , a platform designed to help short-term rental hosts provide five-star hospitality through beautiful digital guidebooks and a full-scale property management system.
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