Hotel guest communication refers to how you speak with your guests throughout their hotel journey with you. 

From the point of their booking and confirmation with your hotel to their arrival and whole stay–it consists of everything from your brand voice to the verbiage your staff uses. 

It’s also one of those things that hotels face the most difficulty in getting right. As this report from Grammarly puts it, poor customer communication leads to an annual loss of $1.2 trillion in the US alone. 

So getting your hotel guest communication right isn’t one of those nice things to have; it’s table stakes. 

Luckily, we have done all the heavy lifting for you. Follow the best hotel guest communication tips from below, delight your guests, and ultimately, stand out from the crowd. 

1. Personalize All the Way

Ask yourself this: Would you speak the same way to a high school kid as you would to a forty-something business professional? 

Most likely not.

Adopt the same principle with your guests. In 2024, there’s simply no excuse not to. Go through your records of their past stays and recent bookings and figure out their demographics. Simply doing this will give you some idea of how to approach a guest. 

For your online communications, generative AI chatbots can play a massive role as well.

They have all the guest records through past conversations and bookings; they also run on massive language models that can help them adapt their tone of voice and language to your guest in a heartbeat.

So whether you’re online or offline, personalization is great for improving your hotel guest communication.

2. Start With a Smile

A smile can do wonders. It’s often the best way to open others up to you. You exude warmth and positivity, while, at the same time, lower the defenses of others.

Remember, non-verbal communication plays a significant role in your interactions (65% to be exact), as this paper from the University of Minnesota states. 

In a nutshell, it sets the tone of your interaction, helps you build rapport with people, and lets them feel at ease around you.

It will work similarly for your guests. So smiling authentically, then, is your second hotel guest communication tip–do it well and you will start off on the best foot.

3. Be Obsessed With Solving for Guests  

“The most important single thing,” as Jeff Bezos once said, “is to focus obsessively on the customer.” 

How does that work in practice for a hotelier like you who’s trying to improve their hotel guest communication processes? 

As a hotelier, you’re in the business of solving your guests' problems. It’s a blindingly obvious fact–and for that reason, it can often be easy to miss.

In practice, this means every member of your staff should be focused on giving value to your guests, solving any of their complaints almost instantly (should they arise), and making them feel valued and happy with every interaction.

4. Be Empathetic in Your Listening

Listening to your guests is one thing; figuring out the pain points behind their words it’s quite another. 

One handy hotel guest communication trick is to listen attentively to your guests' tone of voice, choice of words, and emphasis on specific words. 

In other words, try to go beyond the surface and dig through the real concerns behind their issue.

In fact, few things would be worse than not reading the room correctly. 

Remember, a guest who suffered through a 2-minute delay in check-in is massively different from someone who is demanding an immediate room change because of some hassle.

Indeed, as research from gitnux has shown, ineffective listening alone can cause a collective loss of $62.4 billion per year across global companies. 

So adopt an approach of empathetic listening to your hotel guest communication strategies, and you should comfortably avoid adding up to the above statistic.

5. Use Proper Hotel Verbiage

Using simple, standardized hotel terms can go a long way in improving your hotel guest communication too.

They have been widely researched, broadly adopted by most hotels around the world, and have, over time, been tweaked or mastered through multiple iterations. 

From apologizing for an inconvenience to welcoming your guests, there are standard templates or phrases for everything. 

Here are a few examples:

1. “Good morning/evening, sir/madam. Welcome to XYZ hotel. How can I help you?”
2. “So what brings you the town today?”
3. “I'm very sorry to hear that.”
4. “That sounds frustrating” 
5. “How’s your day going?”

The above and similar verbiage can do wonders for your guest's experience. 

You don’t even have to overthink–just tweak them to the individual situation and you'll be good to go.
Adopting standard hotel verbiage for your hotel guest communication strategy will help you not only be more professional–it can improve your brand over a period of time as well. 

7. Don’t Shy Away From Small Talk 

The hospitality industry isn’t exactly a mecca for introverts. 

Being socially calibrated and having a good command of language is part of the game–small talk, as much as you might loathe it, can massively tip things in your favor.

“Discussing things that fall outside of work can humanize you to your colleagues, which can build trust,” says Art Markman for The Fast Company. “In addition, people can learn a lot about who you are from just a small interaction, which can help to make the work-related portion of the discussion flow more smoothly.”

You don’t have to go overboard though. 

Even simple things will do wonders: a good morning, a pleasant compliment, or asking people about their day–all of these can go a long way in making your guests feel welcome.

Therefore, adopt small talk into your hotel guest communication workflow.

8. Go Heavy on First Time Resolution (FTR)

Ever been in a situation where you had to chase a resolution for a single complaint for the millionth time? Pretty lame experience, isn’t it?

Make no mistakes–80% of customers feel the same and would switch their loyalties in a heartbeat, especially if their issues aren’t resolved during the first point of contact, as research from CustomerThink shows.

So whether it’s a complaint about a noisy room, a request for early breakfast, or even a callback to meet your manager–you have to be on your toes.

In short, solve a problem as quickly as it arises and you’d improve your hotel guest communication even more.    

9. Stay Prepared for Anything

Continuing on the point from above, staying agile is vital in the hotel business, especially when it comes to effective hotel guest communication.

In other words, you should be prepared for anything: a guest abruptly calling you up at midnight, tidying up your rooms quickly for an instant booking, or even some glitch in the channel manager–it’s all possible.

So being prepared for uncertain situations or issues, staying agile, and thinking on your feet are going to be keys to happy, long-term guests.

10. Maintain a Positive Body Language  

You’ve probably already heard it a million times, but we’ll say it nonetheless: how you say something is as important as what you say.

As it turns out, this applies to your hotel guest communication strategy as well.

As research has shown, your nonverbal communication (NVC) conveys as much as 65% of the information as your verbal one. 

In other words, your tone of voice, clarity of speech, or even how you’re standing–it all plays a role.

So adopting (and maintaining) positive body language is key. Here are a few things you can adopt to show a positive body language:

1. Stand tall with your shoulders back and wide.
2. Make sure your spine is straight, as it will make you look confident and optimistic.
3. Maintaining regular eye contact is also essential–it shows you’re paying attention to your guests and not dozing off. 
4. Smile and nod as needed during conversations with your guests. Again, both show that you’re actually listening to them–even if unconsciously–and will leave a good impression about you. 
5. Similarly, open gestures can make a huge difference in how you come across. Adopt an open pose, don’t talk with closed fists, and so on–you will be good to go. 

Follow through on the above points, and you will be one step closer to adopting the best guest communication for your hotel guests. 

11. Maintain 24/7 Communication Across All Channels

Imagine this: You’re having trouble with your stay. You’ve tried your luck with the customer service team with an email, gave a shot to a chatbot. 

However, nothing seems to have worked. 

Naturally you’d now like to speak to the manager, but for whatever reason, you cannot. How would you feel?

It’s not a pretty picture. Unsurprisingly, many customers feel the same, as confirmed by this Freshworks piece. 

Setting up communication across all channels, it turns out, is very important. In practice, from this point of view, getting your hotel guest communication right will come out as: 

1. Optimizing your emails for the best hospitality verbiage, tone of voice, and, most importantly, quick replies.
2. Adopting chatbot automation for your WhatsApp or Instagram accounts–all leading to personalized and quick communication.
3. At all times, the opportunity for phone or even face-to-face communication should always be on the table, should your guests want to go through this channel.
   

So it's critical to give your guests a plethora of options they’d like to go for.

12. Be Consistent 

What’s the point of communication if it’s all a disorganized jungle? 

If your customer service says one thing to your guest, but your front desk conveys something totally opposite, you’re starting off from a troubled base.

It also means that how your guests feel about your hotel shouldn’t change depending on who they’re speaking with. 

Be it the general manager, front desk, or concierge–all of your staff should follow consistent communication guidelines to give your guests the best experience. 

13. Speak With High Energy Throughout

Energy is contagious. As far as truisms go, probably not one is as important as this one.

When you speak or do something with energy and passion, you not only help yourself be more effective, but you also get the ability to inspire others. 

Indeed, go through any course on rhetoric or public communication, and you will see how even small elements, like which consonants or vowels you use or even your breathing style, can have a massive impact on how you harness and transfer the energy to the audience.

Here are a few things to get you started with high energy:

1. Speak from your diaphragm. Breathe into your diaphragm and speak as you breathe out.
2. Make sure you’re using the appropriate hand gestures and face signs to be in the flow and hold your guest’s attention.
3. Be a little louder than you usually speak.
4. Practice public speaking in your free time.

And last but not least, make sure you’re well-rested for the job–it will pay dividends in keeping your energy high. 

These above tips can help you get your energy right and help you improve your hotel guest communication a little more.

14. Prune Out the Filler Words From Your Speech

Filler words are the umms and ahs of your speech. 

They are also something that can make others perceive you as underconfident or unsure of yourself.

Understandably, then, filler words don’t belong in the world of guest communications, where your guests want to feel safe about you and the place they will be staying for a while. 

Moreover, they also distract your readers from what you want to communicate.

So how do you cut them down?

Speaking slowly and clearly can help. 

Take your time, organize your thoughts, and then speak what you’d like to say in as few words as possible.

Similarly, not saying anything at all is also good practice. Listen to your guest intently without coming up with instant retorts or going on internal tangents, let the sense emerge from things on its own, and then communicate accordingly.

Do this well and you will be ahead of 90% of your competition in improving your hotel guest communication. 

15. Adopt Automation and Cut Down the Friction

You can cut down tons of your expenses and improve your processes by simply adopting the latest tech automation stack.

Automated check-ins and check-outs, billings, guest surveys, and customer service are clear-cut applications for getting your automation right. Besides reduced costs, automation has become important for improving your guest communication as well, such as:

1. Automation helps you give 24/7 service to your customers. With generative AI chatbots like Brance, you can quickly answer any and all queries of your guests without any issues.
2. This parlays then into better productivity as well, leading to a smoother guest experience and service

As you probably guessed, adopting automation into your tech stack is only going to play a massive role in the coming decade. 

So stay ahead of the competition and adapt to the change right now

16. Adopt to Faults or Slip-ups Promptly

One of the worst things you can do is botch up your guest’s experience by some mistake; the next worst thing is not taking responsibility for it or trying to downplay their bad experience. 

Whatever it is that went wrong–a delay in check-in, a misallocation of room, lack of organization, or even a communication slip–take up responsibility for the botch-up immediately, apologize.

Then move on to get to a resolution to the problem as soon as possible. 

As a part of a good hotel guest communication strategy, it’s also important not to force your solution down the throats of your guests.

Offer a slew of options or fixes on their plate–then let them pick what they feel is right.

The 16 Best Hotel Guest Communication Tips for You in 2024  

Every hotel can improve its bottom line by adopting the best hotel guest communications practices in its revenue management strategy. 

However, remembering or adapting these tips is only a part of offering a superior guest experience. Just as important, if not more, is adopting a hotel culture that's all in on guest obsession.

Read Also - 7 Best Ideas for Welcoming Hotel Guests