Weather is the most searched term on Google worldwide right now. We're all more interested in what the weather is doing than we are about anything else. Why does this matter for hoteliers?
According to a poll of 7,500 European travellers, 75% say that good weather is the number one positive memory from their trip. This ranks higher than food and beverage (65%) and landscape (70%). Interestingly, when you directly compare the Google search volume with other aspects of travel, like restaurants or tours, weather comes out on top there too.
So if good weather is what makes a trip memorable, is guest satisfaction down to luck? Bad weather doesn't ruin an experience, it just ruins plans. What if those plans could be easily adjusted as the environment changes?
Your guests are arriving at your hotel with an idea of what they want to do and those plans are being rudely interrupted by Mother Nature. So they get out their phone, they search for the weather to see if it's going to change any time soon and they get frustrated. The reason they are frustrated is that they don’t know what to do now, they don’t know where to go and their experience is going to suffer as a result. They won't leave with positive memories.
You can’t control the weather, but you can control your local advice.
Obvlo enables hotel and travel brands to provide personalised and dynamic recommendations to guests.
Personalisation takes into account 3 key criteria:
Guest preferences (who they are with, why they are there and their interests)
Environmental factors (like the weather, the time of day, the season)
Behaviour and engagement (what sort of places/experiences are they engaging with)
Environmental factors like the weather are critical to guest satisfaction and are not being factored into most guest experience strategies yet. Nobody wants to go to the beach when it’s raining and they probably don’t want cocktails in the morning either.
Obvlo's unique system incorporates live weather feeds and adjusts the rankings of results based on what’s happening outside the hotel. A family travelling with children is therefore not going to be shown the beach when it's going to rain all day.
Every place and experience in Obvlo’s database is categorised and tagged to match it to the right user at the right time. This means knowing what places or activities are suitable for which weather types. It also means knowing which places are child-friendly, which are romantic and a whole host of other important elements that determine personalised recommendations.
Hospitality at its core is about looking after people.
Good service means adjusting what is on offer in real time based on the needs of the individual. Those needs change with the weather and so should your recommendations.
Get in touch to find out more.