Mastering Hotel Guest Communication: 10 Ways To Get It Just Right

From the moment guests start considering a stay to the time they check out, how you communicate with them has a huge impact. Delivering the right blend of warm in-person interactions and engaging digital communications is key to creating lasting bonds – and repeat bookings.

Let’s delve into the key role of communication in guest experience. We’ll cover the different types of communication available to hotels, then share our top tips on how to interact effectively with your guests.

Guest communication refers to the exchange of information and interactions between hotels and their guests. This encompasses all types of interactions: from in-person to online, and from verbal to non-verbal. 

Of course, the ultimate goal of all your communication efforts should be to support a seamless and delightful stay for guests. 

Communication isn’t just about conveying information, it’s about creating a connection with your guests. The manner in which your hotel communicates has a major impact on the overall guest experience. How and when you interact with guests plays a part in influencing their feelings and actions, including:

For this reason, you must develop a strategy for your hotel’s communications as part of your broader focus on delivering exceptional guest experiences. This means finding the best ways to interact with guests before, during, and after their stay.

There are a variety of communication methods to take advantage of when engaging with your guests.

Today’s most effective guest communication strategies often combine the above methods, not rely on one exclusively. eviivo’s global survey of travelers’ communication preferences found that while 58% of guests prefer to communicate with accommodation providers via SMS, WhatsApp or email links, 1 in 4 would still opt to speak directly to a person. Similarly, while digital, self-service solutions like contactless check-in have proliferated in recent years, many guests still want the option to interact with staff upon arrival.

There are many ways to communicate effectively with your guests, using a combination of the methods we outlined above.

Your guests want to know they can contact you from anywhere, at any time. One key strategy for effective guest communication is to always keep your hotel’s lines of communication open. This means giving the ability to reach out with inquiries, requests or feedback around the clock. 

A 24-hour reception desk ensures guests can reach your hotel at any time to secure a room, confirm a reservation, or arrange a late check-in. However, digital and AI-powered communications can also support 24/7 availability – without requiring human staff at the front desk.

Nowadays, many hotels utilize AI-powered tools to respond to online inquiries instantly and accurately. For example, eviivo Concierge™ is a 24/7 tool that allows website visitors to receive instant responses to their queries, moving prospects through the booking funnel while freeing human staff to remain focused on in-house, paying guests. Included with eviivo Suite’s Guest Manager and easily added to your website, Concierge appears as a chat widget in the corner of the screen, effectively acting as a first point of contact for web visitors. 

It’s best to establish direct contact with your guests early, then maintain regular communication throughout their journey. Consider sending communications that keep guests informed and engaged before, during, and after the stay.

If a guest has booked through an OTA or other third-party channel, sending a booking reconfirmation message allows you to establish direct contact and start building a relationship with them on your terms. This gives more opportunities to reduce commission fees by promoting yours upsells and encouraging direct rebooking in the future. eviivo Suite lets you reconfirm OTA bookings automatically, so you’re able to take control of the guest relationship as early as possible.

Once the guest checks in, maintain engagement levels by combining enthusiastic in-person interactions with digital communications to check that they’re satisfied. This makes guests feel valued while providing additional touchpoints for you to enhance their experience, including by upselling your extra products and services where appropriate.

Remember that great communication doesn’t cease after check-out. The communications you send after the guest departs can help you achieve some substantial wins.

Using a guest management system like eviivo Suite’s Guest Manager allows you to send emails or WhatsApp/SMS messages to guests automatically at all stages of their journey. For added flexibility in the event your guest’s plans change, it also allows you to pause or delete any scheduled communications as needed.

One more thing: regular communication is good, but over-communicating is a no-no! Leave enough space between messages to ensure you don’t cross the line into pestering your guests.

Keeping your communications consistent in their tone helps establish your hotel’s brand voice. Whether it’s through written messages, in-person interactions, or online communications, maintaining one “voice” improves the guest experience because it strengthens the guest-hotel bond. Think of it this way: when guests receive communications in a consistent brand voice, they come to recognize and form positive associations with it over time. 

Make sure your tone of voice conveys certain essential qualities – like being friendly and approachable – while maintaining unique characteristics that help set you apart. You can achieve this by setting up tone of voice guidelines that let your staff know the ‘dos and don’ts’ for digital and face-to-face communication. Use your customer service training to set shared expectations about staff’s verbal communication. Give them guidelines to follow, but enough freedom to avoid coming across as robotic.

eviivo Suite provides tools that help you apply a consistent tone of voice across your communications, including standardized quick response templates and a self-learning AI Concierge you can trained to respond to online queries in a specific “voice”.

Although contactless options at hotels have boomed in recent years, check-in is still the touchpoint where guests are most likely to first interact with your staff in person. In fact, hospitality statistics show that 60% of hoteliers report using a traditional check-in process with front desk agents, while 31.5% offer an assisted self-service check-in process. In either case, that first face-to-face interaction between guests and staff is happening upon arrival.

So make sure your front desk staff’s demeanor and professionalism leave a lasting positive impression. Train staff to provide warm and personalized service through both verbal and non-verbal communication. Ensure they ask guests the right questions at check-in: this will allow them to gather the information required to go the extra mile by providing any relevant personalized recommendations. 

eviivo Suite allows front desk staff to access guest details and notes from the same booking flyout they use to check-in guests. This streamlines the process of delivering a personalized experience from the first face-to-face interaction.

You should also emphasize the importance of non-verbal communication to staff in creating the best experience possible. Set staff guidelines and expectations around body language, eye contact, and facial expressions, as these non-verbal cues can help underline or make clear what you’re communicating in words. Getting that right reduces the risk of any confusion and helps build the bond with guests.

Guests want to arrive already equipped with the key information they need for a seamless and enjoyable stay. This means you should communicate important details pre-arrival, such as: 

Sending this useful information upfront can set a positive tone for the upcoming stay while reducing the volume of time-consuming queries that staff have to manage. eviivo Suite’s automated pre-stay messaging helps you ensure that guests always receive the most valuable and relevant information you can provide in advance of their stay.

Consider going a step further and reach out to guests pre-stay to meet any unique needs they may have. For example, let’s say you learn your guest is visiting for an event. Equipped with this info, you’re able to provide them with directions to the venue or recommendations for nearby restaurants – all before they check in!

One potential challenge when managing guest communications is keeping track of the various online channels you use to send and receive messages. These may include key OTA channels, email, WhatsApp and SMS. The last thing you want is to for staff to be so overwhelmed by messages from multiple channels that they lose track and leave guests without any response at all!

To ensure that no quest query goes unanswered, consider streamlining communication channels into a single unified messaging inbox. Using a tool that brings communications from multiple channels together in one place makes it easier for staff to monitor interactions and deal with queries efficiently. This helps you keep that all-important guest experience optimized.

eviivo Suite’s Conversations inbox is the first in the industry to integrate messages from the following sources:

In addition to centralizing all these communications, the Conversations inbox lets hoteliers set up templated ‘quick responses’ and access AI-suggested replies, so they’re able to respond to common queries faster. It is accessible on desktop and mobile, meaning staff can manage communications away from the desk if needed. The inbox’s mobile version integrates many of the same features as the desktop version, enabling staff to view, send and receive messages; manage scheduled communications; and access pre-set message templates.

Finally, eviivo also enables you to manage preapprovals, booking enquiries, and pre-booking requests via supported OTAs within the unified inbox, helping you increase booking conversions from potential guests.

Monitoring and responding to online reviews, whether positive or negative, shows your hotel’s commitment to engaging with guests. Remember that constructive engagement can turn negative experiences into positive outcomes. If you receive negative reviews or complaints online, apologize publicly on the review platform and continue the interaction privately from there to reach a resolution. 

Work up a store of stock responses that you can tweak for each new review. This helps you save time in comparison to writing up each response from scratch. To get started, download our review response templates.

For more control over your online reputation, opt for a guest management software, like eviivo Suite’s Guest Manager, that allows you to manage reviews from Airbnb, Vrbo, and direct bookings in one inbox, as well as set up auto-review templates to provide feedback on Airbnb and Vrbo guests.

Get staff to respond to comments and tags on your hotel’s social media channels as often as possible. This simple action shows a broad online audience how engaged your hotel is with your guests, a smart way to encourage more first-time and repeat bookings.

Social media is also your opportunity to display your hotel’s unique personality on a public forum, so we recommend shying away from using stock or canned responses. Instead, designate staff to provide personalized, thoughtful and engaged responses whenever you receive comments or are tagged by a guest. This response may be the deciding factor in whether that commenter stays again – or what gets a social media browser to book with you!

‘Ordinary’ is over in hospitality. Your job as a hotelier is to make your guests feel truly special during their stay. Tailoring messages to individual guests’ preferences and needs makes them feel uniquely valued and understood, which helps create a great guest experience.

One avenue where you should personalize communications is during face-to-face interactions. Staff’s interactions with guests should always feel authentic and specific. So, emphasize the importance of starting conversations with guests. Train staff to ask the guest about their reasons for visiting and their hopes for their stay. The guest’s responses should inspire your staff to provide tailored recommendations.

Personalizing digital communications is equally crucial. This can take the form of small touches that go a long way in demonstrating your attentiveness and care. For example: 

Take it a step further and reach out with individual one-off communications to show you’re invested in the guest’s stay. For example, if a guest uses one of your messaging platforms to set up a spa treatment, you may wish to send them a short message the next day asking whether they enjoyed it. By injecting just this one extra interaction into your guest communications, you appear more attentive and considerate.

Running personalized promotions that are exclusive to your website is another fantastic way to capture attention and influence specific targets. eviivo Suite enables you to use unique promo codes and member IDs to set up promotions based on the recipient’s previous behaviors, such as a  “Get 10% off your next stay” promo for a regular guest or corporate customer. It also lets staff store and access guest details, notes and preferences in a comprehensive Guest Book, making it easier to personalize your offering and promotions.

Exceptional guest communication starts with making guests feel understood. For hotels welcoming international travelers, language differences can be either one of the biggest barriers or a huge opportunity to stand out.

If a large proportion of your guests come from a particular country or region, it may be worth hiring front desk staff who speak the local language. Even basic fluency can help create a warmer welcome, reduce misunderstandings, and improve the overall guest experience – particularly during check-in, issue resolution, or upselling opportunities.

However, multilingual communication shouldn’t stop at the front desk. Today’s travelers expect a seamless experience throughout their journey. That means making it easy for guests to access information in their preferred language through multilingual website content, chatbot responses, booking confirmations, pre-arrival messages, and in-stay communications.

With eviivo Suite, hotels can support preferred-language guest journeys more easily through multilingual direct booking websites and guest messaging tools that help teams communicate clearly with international travelers at scale. This supports more confident bookings, smoother stays, and better experiences, no matter where your guests come from.

In conclusion, effective communication is a vital ingredient in creating a first-class guest experience. By utilizing the right balance of automation and personalization in your communications, your hotel can deliver memorable stays at scale that keeps guests coming back for more.

eviivo Suite’s Guest Manager integrates a comprehensive suite of guest communication tools for hotels, allowing you to deliver personalized experiences and drive loyalty without overwhelming front desk staff. Use Guest Manager to: