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If your hotel typically sees a boost of guests over the holidays, then you want to capitalize on the opportunity and turn those stays into repeat customers. Texting can help you create a better experience for your visitors, encouraging them to spread a good word about your hotel and return for future stays.

Offer Helpful Recommendations

You can set up automated texts to respond to visitor inquiries about food, entertainment, shopping and more to boost the hotel guest experience. You can even include special deals and coupons for your guests by working with surrounding businesses to establish deals for promoting them to your customers. By offering your guests special deals during their stay, they will be more likely to want to return in the future. And by offering guests a simple way to find great surrounding amenities, you will increase the positive feelings they have about their stay and encourage them to want to return to the area again.

Promoting Holiday Packages

Guests are likely to spend a certain number of days at the hotel, but this can leave the hotel high and dry during the day or two following the normal vacation days. Offer special packages to get your guests to stay an extra day. You can offer a free night after the two nights during a holiday to increase the likelihood of guests wanting to book with your hotel at full price over the holiday time slots. You can also offer special deals for groups that take more than two rooms, encouraging families to get their relatives to book in your hotel each holiday season.

Tourism tips TEXTING hotel Holiday Season

Promote Your Events

When you offer special events, like a special breakfast on Easter or a New Year’s Eve party, you can use SMS text to increase attendance. You can open events to the public to bring in new guests while entertaining the ones that are already booked with you, but you will want to make sure it is easy for attendants to sign up for event text alerts. Use automated text reminders to encourage guests who already have holiday plans of some kind to attend your events that work around the traditional times. If you do plan an event for a traditional time, get a dedicated group to host a party at your location to ensure the event isn’t a flop, and then use texts to send out information about dress, parking, timing and location. Use text alerts in your hotels to send out reminders to attendees, track those who’ve signed up, and send out notices for any last-minute changes.

Utilize Your Contacts

When you’ve started building a contacts list, you want to use opportune times to text them updates or reminders about your hotel. Don’t overdo the texting. Differentiate your lists into segments based on why they originally signed up for texts and then market accordingly. Personalize your texts to appeal to the aspects of your hotel that they’ve already shown an interest in. You can even offer to provide them with more frequent offers and updates if they are interested. Always offer an opt-out option in case they are not interested. Texting can quickly become irritating if it starts to feel like an invasion of privacy.

Continue to look for ways to build your text messaging list and use texting to improve your guest experience. You can automate text requests for your front desk, check-in, booking hotel services, reminding guests of events or deals. Don’t miss out on this exciting new opportunity to push your hotel above the competition.

Author Biography:

Ken Rhie is the CEO of Trumpia, which earned a reputation as the most complete SMS solution including user-friendly user interface and API for mobile engagement, Smart Targeting, advanced automation, enterprise, and cross-channel features for both mass texting and landline texting use cases. Mr. Rhie holds an MBA degree from Harvard Business School. He has over 30 years of experience in the software, internet, and mobile communications industries.