Hoteliers are waking up to the growing revenue opportunities of pre-arrival digital guest engagement.

An expert panel discussion with 4 leading hotel software vendors. Hotels are more than just beds, they offer a variety of guest amenities, services and events to enhance the guest experience. With today’s technology advancements they can easily be offered pre arrival, guests are made aware, buy early and hotels can be prepared to elevate the guest experience. The panelist will discuss strategy and opportunities to enrich both guests and hotel.

Panelists:
Robert Stevenson, CEO at INTELITY
Marvin Speh – Co-Founder & COO at Roompricegenie
Angie Andresen – Senior Director Global Product Management at Shiji
Evan Chen, CEO at Akia
Jos Schaap CEO and Co-Founder at ROOMDEX

People in our industry talk about guest engagement quite a bit but it remains a pretty broad concept. It appears to mean any sort of interaction between hotel and guest done perhaps outside of the traditional front desk check in.

But, why do we want to engage with guests? Seems like a silly question, but it is actually important to understand the business goal you are trying to fix.

• Is it to convey a level of service?
• Is it to create a better guest experience?
• Or is there a commercial benefit in engagement – i.e., get the guests to spend more?

Whether it be immediate sales or long-term reputation development, guest engagement is an attempt to raise hotels above being just a commodity.

But we all know what the current challenge is: the labor shortage. The traditional human service interaction becomes tough when you have less humans to provide service.

So, Enter Digital Guest Engagement. New technology is providing new ways to generate value for the guest, and in fact, provide labor efficiencies for the hotel at the same time.

The panelists discuss these technologies and give insights to hoteliers trying to decide how to move forward with guest engagement technologies.