Creating repeat guests is crucial for the success of your business, not only in steady revenue, but they also serve as brand ambassadors and boost your reputation. 

Encouraging your guests to become loyal returning customers starts with creating a positive connection. But there are several important steps before you can successfully accomplish creating a repeat guest. The goal is to keep your establishment top of mind in the future and have them share their experience with their friends and family. A great place to start is by understanding your target customer/guest and identifying the following traits about them. 

Consider the following:

• Demographics such as age, gender, education level, and income
• Beliefs, values, and lifestyle
• Pain points or stressors they might be experiencing
• Motivations, goals, desires, and aspirations
• Communication preferences such as phone, email, or website 

Once you identified these attributes, you have created a target customer or guest persona that will serve as your fictional representation of your ideal customer. You will start to understand the behaviors, preferences, and motivations of the individual you want to convert to a repeat customer. 

Create a Loyalty Program

One of the best strategies to reward and retain your devoted guests is through implementing a loyalty program. It’s not only about giving rewards but personalizing them to show your guests that you value their business. Consider their preferences and tailor the rewards accordingly. To ensure that your occupancy rates remain high even during off-peak seasons, consider enhancing these rewards and incentives. By offering perks and benefits, such as lower room rates or free upgrades during off-seasons, you can motivate guests to book a stay during quieter periods.

Whether your hotel already has a customer loyalty program or is thinking about creating one, offering gift cards for purchase is a great way to incentivise your guests to repeat their stay. Reserva offers a simple process for hotels to create and customize the type of gift card product your hotel wants to offer. The integrated e-commerce platform allows for easy payment, delivery and management of new orders. It’s also possible to manually issue a gift card or create multiple gift cards for special product offerings. The Reserva Gift Card system creates a personalized PDF with the recipient’s details for your hotel to keep track of new guest reservations and allows your guest to save the gift card with the necessary information. 

Encouraging your guests to provide their email for access to promotional offers and discounted gift cards is a great way to retain customers and create repeat guests. This will boost revenue and maintain a consistent flow of business throughout the year.