What is personalized guest transportation for hotels?

As the hospitality industry continues to expand and innovate, hotels are constantly seeking new ways to elevate the guest experience. With travelers expecting more personalized and seamless services, one trend is making a significant impact: personalized guest transportation. This bespoke approach to travel not only meets the individual needs of each guest but sets hotels apart in a competitive market. 

In this article, we dive into the world of personalized guest transportation, exploring its benefits, implementation strategies, and the transformative impact it has on guest satisfaction and hotel operations.

From luxurious chauffeured city tours to customized journey planning and quick, tailored tours before check-in, personalized transport makes hotels stand out in a cluttered marketplace. Travelers value the convenience and comfort of personalized transportation, and it can often play a key differentiating factor in their decision to book a hotel.

Benefits of personalized guest transportation

Differentiation may be the ultimate goal, but there are other benefits of offering personalized guest transportation.

An enhanced guest experience

What will define a hotel stay is, in the end, the guest experience. Personalized transportation offers an elevated experience that guests won’t find at many properties.

Many travelers, despite their preference for private transportation, opt to take public transportation to experience the city as a local. Personalized transport provides a middle ground – offering the convenience of private transfers with a local touch. 

Instead of getting off a long flight and struggling to find the best route to their hotel, with personalized transport, travelers are met by a driver, saving them precious travel time and unnecessary stress.

The driver doubles as a hidden gem tour guide, tailoring just the right route to the hotel in accordance with the traveler’s interests, allowing them to dive straight into experiencing the city firsthand. From exploring sights along the way to pointing out local spots to visit during their stay, the personalized tour can be as in-depth as the traveler chooses.

Personalized guest transportation not only meets the diverse needs of guests but also showcases the hotel’s commitment to offering flexible and inclusive transportation options, eliminating the fuss of public transportation in a new place and the long lines to get a taxi or Uber.

Guest satisfaction and loyalty

Guest satisfaction and loyalty will be positively impacted by effective transportation services. If a guest is at ease with reliable transportation, it makes the hotel look good. That, in turn, produces repeat guests that develop into long-term loyal patrons or evangelists.

Evangelists are people who will promote a business to their inner or outer circle. They will leave positive reviews online or increase word of mouth by letting others know about the exceptional services a hotel offers to their guests.

And there is no better marketing than “I’ve tried this, you should try it as well.”

Increased upsell revenue

Guest transportation not only increases guest satisfaction but is also a highly profitable opportunity for a hotel to increase revenue streams. Whether it’s with an in-house driving team or an external vendor, hotels can earn additional revenue on every ride.

However, the minute details of organizing private transport for guests can be overwhelming and need coordination, supervision, and management of all aspects of the pickup from the airport by the hotel staff. That’s where an external vendor can come into play, helping the hotel manage and craft personalized guest transport with ease. 

Challenges of manual guest transportation

There are three main pain points when it comes to manually setting up guest transportation.

1. Setting pickups for each guest

Picking up the phone to set up transfers for each one of your guests is simply not scalable – especially in peak season. The best case scenario is to allocate some budget specifically for this service with a team for keeping track of rides operated, needs, capacity, guest satisfaction, financial arrangements, etc.

2. Accessing information about upselling opportunities

There’s a lot of information required for personalized guest transports. What time is their airport pickup scheduled for? Are they going to need an early check-in? Have they booked their ride back to the airport? Is it their first time in your city? Do they need more guided tours or a short trip that you can offer?

All this information cannot live in an Excel spreadsheet, and your team will stretch too thin trying to keep everything up-to-date, which will mean lost revenue opportunities. 

3. Measuring guest satisfaction

How do you know if your driving crew hit the mark when you don’t have access to your guest reviews? Sure, you can ask how the service was, but usually, when people are asked for face-to-face feedback, they tend to sugarcoat things. 

A recent study showed exactly that: a company might be unaware of negative customer experiences because customers never disclosed their complaints because they were asked face to face. 

When people don’t give an honest review for a specific service, they tend to judge the complete experience as a whole, which might result in negative online reviews on booking platforms.

Technology to support personalized transportation

With everything that goes into offering personalized transportation to guests, it’s best for hotels to leverage guest airport pickup software tool that simplifies the experience for guests and allows hotels to put manual tasks on autopilot. 

With a hotel software solution for guest airport pickups, guests can: 

• Book their transfer right after they book a room with their hotel
• Pay in advance with zero surprises
• Leave online reviews for complete transparency
• Have access to 24/7 support in case things don’t go as planned

When integrated with the PMS, hotels can access all relevant information about guests to make the experience as personalized as possible. From easily identifying upsell opportunities like early check-ins to getting notified about a guest’s ETA to prepare for arrival, hotels can earn more revenue while enhancing the guest experience, all through a single platform.

Getting started with personalized transportation

In a time when every second counts, at the end of the day, it all comes down to one question: how do I start? To set up their personalized guest transportation service, hotels need to do some pre-work and keep optimizing for maximum efficiency.

Here are three simple steps to get you off the ground:

1. Set clear goals

One thing you should never forget is that if you decide to add personalized transportation for your guests to your list of offerings, you need to aim for the sky when it comes to quality. After all, this is going to be the first touchpoint between you and your guests.

Setting clear goals about satisfaction rates and added revenue will allow you to pick the right people for the job but also determine the investment needed.

2. Know your guests

Ask yourself: “Do my guests need this service?”. Let’s be realistic, not all hotels attract the same audiences. Does the majority of your guests consist of students? Private guest transfers might not be the right fit for you. Do you usually welcome families or couples? These people want to check in as soon as possible, so they’ll most likely appreciate the service.

If you don’t know whether you should invest time and energy in setting up a personalized transportation service, get your front office team to ask your guests upon check-in for feedback or send out a survey to your existing database.

To play it safe, one other solution would be to opt in for an on-demand guest transportation service with no strings attached and no in-house team needed.

3. Keep track of performance & optimize

Ask your guests about their experience, use surveys and questionnaires, collect data, monitor your reviews, and, generally, use as much information as you can to see how you’re doing.

The road to added revenue and personalized guest experience is paved with good intentions but the ugly truth is that you might miss the mark. By accessing your data, you will understand where and why, but also how to tackle any issues.

Conclusion

Customized transportation for guests enables hotels to redefine customer experience, fine-tune day-to-day operations, and open up avenues to more revenue streams. 

Personalized transportation distinguishes a property from increasingly saturated competition and provides assurance for a level of service that creates lifetime customer loyalty. Properties that go overboard in this area don’t simply meet the needs of the guests—instead, they overflow, building a loyal and growing client base.