If you feel like your hotel or bed and breakfast is lacking something, start where guests spend most of their time—their room. Here’s how to enhance things.
You’ve done your best to provide your hotel’s guests with a comfortable and enjoyable stay, but it still feels like something is missing. Guests want more out of their room than a place to sleep, change, and clean up. Whether on vacation or a business trip, guests spend a lot of time in their rooms and need some pampering and entertainment. To help you, you share four ideas for in-room experiences for your guests.
Upgrade the TV
Once, a room’s television was a hotel room’s only entertainment option. Now, guests bring their laptops, phones, tablets, and so forth to stream a raging river of content. Can your TV compete? Maybe not always, but it can still provide plenty of specific features that make a guest’s stay more fun. When upgrading your hotel’s TVs, be sure to set up a network to provide movies and TV shows, with options for local and national news, weather, and kids’ viewing. Also, give guests ways to access information on your hotel, billing, local attractions, and more. Make the TV more than a TV!
Introduce Guests to the Area
Whether you present it in a binder or through your hotel TV system, create a collection of information to introduce your guests to your community. Provide a breakdown of all the things guests might be interested in, such as local restaurants, fun places to hang out, historical sites, houses of worship, and more. This helps spark ideas and lets guests plan for the downtime they’ll inevitably have. Include coupons, tips, and insider information on the best merchants, deals, and ways to get around.
Provide a Nice Basket
Provide guests with a basket—and not just any basket. Fill it with goodies from local merchants, samples of cleaning and grooming products, postcards, and other things to make them feel welcome. This is a terrific opportunity to establish deals with your fellow businesses. You send customers their way in exchange for the above samples, discounts, and the like. At the same time, you can show your community’s best face and to inject some necessary cash into the local economy. Keep theme nights in mind. Families might appreciate a few bags of popcorn and snacks for a movie night. A bottle of wine wouldn’t go amiss for a newlywed couple or someone celebrating an important anniversary. Find out what you can about guests and what’s most important to them. It’s the little things that people will remember and tell their friends about back home.
Have Strong Wi-Fi
Here’s the last of our four ideas for in-room experiences for your guests. Certain amenities must always be present if you don’t want to hear from disgruntled guests. Hot water, cozy blankets, and Wi-Fi that works. Ensure your guests can access the internet unimpeded. They need to stream content, reach family and friends, complete and provide work to the home office, and more. If internet service is spotty, you can bet they’ll mention it on the online review sites when they reach a place with great Wi-Fi.