Professional travelers
With my years traveling alone, with friends and the last 15 years with babies, children and my family - I am sure you can consider me a professional travel planner! All the time I come across hotels, transfer companies and hotels who never travel them selves. This is a disadvantages as it makes it easy not to understand the travelers point of view. As a service institution there are things you need to learn about your guests.
This is what you need to know about your hotel guests:
Even though we spend money on our vacations, most of us aren't rich or famous.
In fact, many of us has worked really hard, so it's safe to assume that we are exhausted when we arrive at your hotel.
If you find us a bit odd: We probably feel very pail, low on energy and we act a bit private and might be hiding behind our hoodies and sun glasses. It might be safe to consider that we need some time.
We are tourists, but we don't like to consider our selves as tourists.
We are all different and there are millions of reasons why we end up spending our most precious time of the year at your place.
Maybe money is the reason we chose your hotel and we couldn't afford better, in this case know that budget prices also can be really expensive for some. So do your very best to make the stay beyond great for your guests.
Your hotel might be the few days some of your hotels guests, chose to spend too much money, just to experience some luxury (as a once in a lifetime experience).
Maybe we just weren't more creative, and we just ended up at your hotel.
THERE ARE MILLIONS OF REASONS, and it's really useful for you as a hotel- or restaurant owner to reflect over the many reasons. It will give you an advantage on how to accommodate your guest at the very best!
The Process of Travel Planning
As a Hotel Manager you should know that we never know exactly where we're going in an early stage of making our vacations plans. That's why "free cancellation" gives us the freedom to make plans and explore.
Vacation planning is for most of us a process.
Challenges we come across when traveling:
Soundproofing
Imagine spending 10 full months in a colder and darker country, literally working your butt off! When you finally find your way to a destination where relaxation is on the agenda - you can hear the people from the neighbor room talk, walk and even when they go for a shower. This can be a major crisis for a holiday.
Housekeeping
You're on you vacation. Meaning; no alarm, no sence of time or date, late nights and if you didn't sleep a lot during the winter you sure wont be happy with housekeeping knocking down your door every morning. Have a service minded approach to it, and show some respect. Create a routine with "do not disturb" lights or signs. Some hotels offer house keeping until 16:00 (my favorite!) plus a turn-down-service on demand (recommended).
Late Check In
When arriving late just because the flight or ferry doesn't arrive earlier, don't offer the room to someone else. This doesn't mean that your guest who already paid for the hotel room, or already made particular requests for the room, doesn't arrive.
Specially in Santorini we experienced some truly strange situations with this, which wasn't a very delightful experience - especially when traveling with children and all.
Communications prior to arrival
Hotels who doesn't answer on booking apps like hotels.com and booking.com seems very unprofessional and more importantly - they don't seem reliable. If you are a family run restaurant or hotel, make sure to team up with someone who can take care of this part of your service. We always send messages during our vacation planning to check how the hotel service is. It tells us a lot about what we can expect.
Always have in mind that the vacation is your guests MOST HOLY time of the year. THE ME TIME!!!
Party people/Teenagers
The same way as many hotels has their "Adult only", it is important to give your guests a chance to choose another hotel - if you know that you will have a lot of noice and party people running in and out of the rooms all night long. It is terrible to experience loud teenagers while trying to sleep in your room (especially without soundproofing). Drunk young people tend to invite guests to their rooms, and they tend to knock on the wrong doors etc. Even though most of us love a great party, it's fair to keep the partying on suitable places.
Loud families
Most of the time families and children are a true pleasure, but some times it's not only dominating but embarrassing to watch mothers scold at their husband or children. Even though this might not be something you can give your other guests a heads up on, I do recommend having house rules for your hotel which they can get already by booking your hotel on the travel app. Or even a sms-service sending your guests some notifications at different hours the first 24 hours at their stay about which hours you have breakfast services, pool hours and when you expect the guests to show consideration for other hotel guests after certain hours.
Kritikakis Village Hotel in Ios Island has solved the in house service issues really professional and smooth with their hotel app.
Things we love at a hotel:
Pick Up Service
After a long travel, it is really nice to be picked up at the airport or port.
For us this service means that our journey ends when we reach our destination and it feels welcoming!
It is stressful to have to figure out where to find a cab or transfer plus standing in lines. This is one of the services we find in most of the places we visit in Greece.
Water in the fridge
When arriving at the hotel, we´re always thirsty.An empty fridge is better than none, but does it really cost that much to fill the fridge with a bottle of complimentary drinking water?
AC-remote in a new plastic sleve
Let's face it, we all use the airconditioning. And I mean ALL.
And let's talk about the remote control... we use it when we enter the room from a day outside handling cash, door handles and so on. We use the remote control when get out of the shower, when we're sleeping to tune down the power and the list goes on. Is it that difficult to keep the remote in a new plastic sleeve?
Bathroom amenities
We love that most hotels have highh quality bathroom amenities like shampoo, showergel and conditioner, because this means that we don't need to use weight on these amenities on our journey!
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