Guest Histories: An Untapped Service Resource

Service excellence will be a critical factor in the success of hotels in the 1990s. Obtaining brand loyalty will be the key in hotel companies' competitive strategies. Three factors will determine the guest's choice of hotel brand: 1. incentives, 2. individual attention, and 3. recognition. Individualized, personal attention to guests' preferences is possible by employing automated guest-history programs. However, such programs are only as good as the information collected and stored for future use. Much useful marketing data are either completely ignored or never obtained. Because guests generally answer any query posed to them, guest-history programs should be designed to capture more than just accounting-related information. Once obtained, the information must be stored long enough to be useful. An analysis of the data must use virtually every piece of information available. Present-day computer databases make this all possible.