This week George Ross, managing director of In2action, the leading provider of activity services for UK holiday parks, hotels and resorts, shared his tips with Hotel Business on how the right activity programme can leave you with happy, smiling guests.
With guest satisfaction the top priority of most hotel managers, activity programmes can set your hotel apart and help it make its mark. Activities also give hotel staff many more touch points with guests, allowing you to give them the best experience possible.
Training
Running activity programmes requires hotel staff to be expertly trained, often in niche areas. The staff should be confident in their abilities and be able to translate this confidence and professionalism to guests undertaking an activity for the first time.
Ensure customers are at the heart of every activity session. Instructors should be able to build rapport with every type of guest.
Understand guest profiles
In all likelihood, a hotel's guest profiles will change depending on the season. Activity services and optional extras on offer at a hotel should change to reflect this. The same programmes will not always appeal to, nor serve, both families and retirees. Passive activities for older guests and toddler packages are usually a hit in the autumn and winter months, however with a marked increase in the number of over 50s booking adventure holidays, you might also look to change an existing activity to be more suitable for an older clientele. Converting an original activity programme, to include using older instructors for example, is simple but can have a huge effect on guest satisfaction.
Improving customer loyalty
Activity programmes that allow children to build upon their skills year by year always prove popular and leave families wanting more. Strategically planning activity sessions with beginner, intermediate and advanced certificates, such as sports academies, is a great way to entice guests back for another year to complete the next stage. Another great tip we have learned from our circus skills programme is to have staff demonstrate all the skills that a guest could potentially learn at the start of session one and then teach a selection of them during the first class. Guests then have the opportunity to come back for more sessions to learn the rest of the skills they have seen.
Collecting data on your guests, including the optional activities they take part in, will help you target them in the future and increase customer return rates. A good tip is to send targeted emails relating to the activity they took part in. For example, if a guest took part in an archery session, send them an email six months later with top tips to improve their archery skills, links to articles, suggestions for other activities to try if they liked archery and an invitation to take part in the next level of archery instruction.
Give families the best memories
There is no better way to implant the memory of a great hotel in a parent's mind than to create a family first. Happy memories stay with families forever and they will never forget the holiday when their little ones learned to ride a bike for the first time, or swam their first 100m.
The best activity programmes are guest centric, focusing on the needs of your hotel's guest profiles. They allow guests to have much more contact time with staff, giving a better impression overall of your customer service as well as giving them more opportunities for complaints or compliments to be heard. Activity services also ensure your hotel sticks out in a guest's mind and lives on in their memories for years to come.
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