The Art of Guest Profiling: 6 Essential Elements Every Hotelier Should Track

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In today's competitive hospitality landscape, understanding your guests is more crucial than ever. Guest profiling has evolved beyond basic demographic information to become a sophisticated tool for delivering exceptional experiences. By gathering and analyzing specific points of data from across your many tools, hotels can create a centralized guest profile that keeps customers coming back. Let's explore the six fundamental categories that form the foundation of effective guest profiling.

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Travel Companions: Understanding Guest Dynamics

Knowing who your guests travel with provides invaluable insights into their needs and preferences. A couple celebrating their anniversary will have vastly different expectations than a business traveler or a family with young children. This information helps hotels prepare appropriate room configurations, amenities, and special touches before guests even arrive. Understanding travel companions also allows staff to proactively address specific needs, such as arranging connecting rooms for families or ensuring a quiet floor for business travelers.

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Purpose of Stay: The Why Behind the Visit

The reason for a guest's stay is perhaps one of the most crucial pieces of information in their profile. Whether it's a milestone celebration like an anniversary or birthday, a business conference, or a leisure getaway, each purpose demands its own unique approach to service delivery. Hotels can use this information to create targeted welcome messages and experiences that perfectly align with the guest's objectives. Understanding the purpose of stay also enables staff to anticipate needs and provide thoughtful touches that demonstrate attention to detail, such as a bottle of champagne for anniversary celebrations or extra power outlets for business travelers.

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Pet Companionship: Catering to Four-Legged Guests

As pet travel becomes increasingly common, tracking pet-related information has become essential for modern hospitality operations. Knowing whether a guest travels with pets allows hotels to prepare appropriate accommodations and amenities, from pet beds to food bowls. This information also helps properties manage their pet policies effectively and ensure other guests' comfort. Understanding pet preferences and requirements enables hotels to create truly inclusive experiences that cater to both human and animal guests.

Quick tip: A guest would be thrilled if you called their pet by name or had a doggy bed waiting in the room.

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Age Verification: Ensuring Compliance and Safety

Tracking guest age is not just about legal compliance – it's about creating appropriate experiences and ensuring guest safety. This information is particularly crucial for properties that serve alcohol or offer age-restricted amenities and activities. Knowing guests' ages helps staff make informed decisions about room placement, amenity access, and menu offerings.

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Birthday Celebrations: Creating Memorable Moments

Birthday information serves as a powerful tool for creating personalized experiences and building long-term guest loyalty. Hotels can use this data to surprise guests with special touches during their stay, whether they're celebrating during their visit or not. Birthday tracking also enables properties to send targeted promotions and special offers throughout the year. This personal touch shows guests that the hotel values their relationship beyond just the current stay.

Quick tip: Add pronouns to your guest directory, in addition to names, for a properly inclusive environment. 

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Purchase Patterns: Understanding Guest Value

Tracking guest purchases provides crucial insights into preferences and spending habits that can inform service delivery and marketing strategies. This data helps properties identify high-value guests and understand which amenities and services are most popular among different guest segments – even across multiple properties. Purchase history can guide everything from inventory management to personalized promotional offers. This information can also help properties develop loyalty programs and reward structures that truly resonate with their guests.

Conclusion: One Centralized Guest Profile

These six key categories of guest information can transform a hotel's bottom line when used correctly. At Akia, we understand that these data points are a lot to keep up with. That’s why we’ve built our platform to automatically extract these metrics into a single centralized guest profile. You heard correctly – Akia can take data from your PMS, marketing tool, digital tipping tool, messaging tool, etc. from one or across multiple properties and combine this into a single source of truth. If you’re intrigued by any of the categories above and want to leave the spreadsheet behind – schedule a demo call today. 

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