The Big Tech Shift Coming to Hotels In Next 24 Months: My Unfiltered Thoughts on Personalization in Hospitality - Martin Soler

Josiah: Do you keep hearing about personalization - even "hyper-personalization" - in hospitality and want to move beyond the hype to figure out what it could really look like to use technology to serve and delight your guests at scale? If so, stay tuned because Martin Soler, a former hotel general manager turned technology strategist and hospitality consultant, is going to be walking through this with us today. Martin is and has been a fractional chief marketing officer for some of the biggest hotel tech companies in the world and, because of all of his career experiences, can bring a perspective that really bridges the gap between excellence in traditional hospitality and cutting-edge tech solutions. In this episode, we cover why only 9% of most hotel guests are likely to return, how to gather meaningful guest information so you can surprise and delight them without annoying your guests, and a bold prediction Martin makes about a big tech shift coming to the hotel industry in the next 24 months. Let's get started. 

[intro music]

Martin: For me, hyper-personalization is something hotels have always been doing. Good hotels have always done that, right? The GM or the front desk or the concierge knows that Mr. Smith is coming, knows that Mr. Smith comes with the dog and the family, and prepares everything in their little card file where they keep all the data on Mr. Smith, and so they personalize everything. This is what hospitality does. Personalization, good morning, Mr. Smith, that's personalization. Then welcome back. That's personalization. They know that you've been there before. It's humongous. Just saying welcome back to someone, recognition is the number one. I would say that 80% of personalization is just recognizing the person. This is welcome back, good. Have you stayed with us before? That's already saying that you have no idea who that person is. It's pretty insulting. The problem is how to do it at scale. And the only ones who've done it at scale are the tech companies. The others in hospitality who can do it as artisans. We have artists of personalization. We hire special people who can memorize a lot, who hang around with the company and the hotel for 20-plus years, who know everybody and everything and every preference in their head. Those are special people. But how could you scale that? You can't scale it to 5,000 hotels. You'd have to find 5,000 of those people, train them, and they'd have to stay there. The minute they move, it's pretty disastrous, and so on. How do we do this at scale? It's a problem, right? Especially in our industry, the tech companies have figured it out. Google, Apple, all the tech companies do it already, but they already have all their stack, all their technology, all their data is kind of centralized. Well, Google went through a massive, bringing it all together somewhat 10 years ago when they started They're Google Plus, which they then used as a system to personalize everything, and all your search and all your accounts are now centralized and so forth. There's a massive undertaking for them. And if they can do it, we should be able to do it in the hotel industry. We have mostly got the tech to do it. It does exist. Now, the question is the plumbing. Can that tech speak to each other? Is it connected? Is there enough? incentive or drive for the people who need to build it to actually go and do it. Today, in most PMS systems or in a lot of PMS systems, it's easier to create a new profile for Josiah than to go and find the old one. So every time you go back to the hotel, you're going to have a new profile. So you have like 20 profiles.

Josiah: I was going to ask you about this, Martin, because I was curious, for people that are maybe new to this, you mentioned the technology is there. I was curious: What are the pieces of technology that provide this hyper-personalized experience? I imagine there's all the first touch points, where there's the booking. If I hit the website, you're collecting some information. If I'm calling in there, Are those first line of touch points then feeding into the property management system? Or what are the different components that go into hyper-personalization?

Martin: Well, that's the problem; those touch points are easy to fix. They're the easy part. The problem is the core system where, you know, what's your single source of truth? Where is the data? Where is the profile of that person? And that's usually the PMS. And that's the one which is holding it all back.

Josiah: Is it how the technology is built? I don't know. It feels like how is this such a hard problem to solve? Or it has been historically. Is it the structure or the technology of the PMS?

Martin: Is the room available or not? So it's all designed; the architecture is all around the room. It's not around the person, right? So now there are a few PMSs that are building around the person. And then there is a new layer coming in, which is a customer data platform, which is going to be necessary, especially for those who are not changing their PMS system, because that will then put another layer, which can aggregate all that data together and have the customer profile and so on. But it's kind of a crutch to the real problem. Let's go fix the PMS because everything tends to break down. Booking engines and online reservation systems were built because channel matters and all these things were built because the PMS couldn't deal with it. So you had a layer created, which is what we now call CRS or different wordings for it. But that whole layer was created because PMS couldn't deal with that.

Josiah: So one thing I'm super curious about, Martin, is in your ideal state to move to a world where we can provide hyper-personalization at scale, is a CRM required that's more person-focused or are there now property management systems that are becoming more person-focused? Does it need to be some layer or integration? If I'm somebody who's thinking I want this future, what should they be shopping for or looking for?

Martin: Shop for a PMS. Ideally, you go shop for the right PMS because if you put in a layer on top that is a solution. I'm not saying it isn't. It is definitely a solution because you might have run into multiple PMSs. If you've got many hotels, you're going to have. There are those two solutions. If you have a layer on top, you're going to end up always building crutches around your you know, not-so-good PMS system when you could replace it. And there are several options now on the market, including where it is around the guest. And then you can choose whether you want to layer on top or not. But if you've made a conscious choice, not because your system is too old or can't deal with it, but because that's a different strategy you're taking, that's okay. But if you're trying to fix the basic problem by adding another layer, it's going to break. At some point, it's going to break. Or some other tech comes along. I covered that in one of my newsletters. It's like, we don't know where tech is going. Is it going to be Is it going to be AI pins? Clearly not. Not this time. Maybe next one. Is it going to be glasses? We don't know what the next thing is going to be. If our systems can't communicate easily and can't adapt to new technology easily, we're going to keep adding layers. The more layers, the more points of failure, and so on and so forth. Hotels need to just And I think now is the time. Now, there's enough good solutions to replace the PMS on the market with cloud-based solutions. The Internet's strong enough. All these systems now work well enough that you can go and replace it easily. And that was this article I once wrote on the PMS wars is that this is going to happen. The next 24 months are going to be changing everybody's system. And it's one of these big shifts that I think is going to happen in the next few years.

Josiah: Amazing. I'll link to that in the show notes. And you also mentioned your newsletter. I encourage everyone who is listening to this, watching this to check out your newsletter. I'll link to that in the show notes as well. I encourage everyone to subscribe because it is my choice. If I had to pick one newsletter that I'm reading each week, it would be Martin's newsletter. It covers strategy, branding, technology. So make sure you sign up and check out that link in the show notes. So that's fascinating. And I think to your other point, Martin, of not knowing where technology is necessarily going, I'm curious for our listeners. So it sounds like you've got to have the right technology in place. But if, for whatever reason, you just don't have the ability to be part of making a change there, are there other things that you can do to prepare if you might not know where technology goes with regards to guest data? Or is there other things that you could do now to prepare for a future where you might have better technology or be in a world where hyper-personalization at scale is possible? What can our listeners do today?

Martin: Yeah, if they're not going to replace their PMS, if that's really off the books, off the table for now, then yes, find a CRM solution that can deal with that because that CRM solution custom-built for hospitality will enable you to later on build into, you know, later on when you are going to change your PMS, you can then plug that in. So I would say that would be the fastest way to some kind of a win, but you will just be aware that it will take a lot of plumbing. All these systems are going to take, you know, it's, whereas changing your PMS is rough plumbing now, but will ease out over time, whereas CRM will be less plumbing now, more plumbing over time. And CRM companies are going to hate me for saying this.

Josiah: That's OK. We keep it honest on the show. We say what's actually going on. And that's why I appreciate your perspective and you're sharing that. And I think, you know, so the technology piece is one. And then the other thing is just making sure that you're collecting the right data, right? Because there are so many data fields where you may need to know a guest's birthday for something else, But are you really going to run promotions based on that or interact with them differently because of that? There are so many other things if you think about this kind of transaction. And you and I have talked a lot about kind of point of sale systems and how people are transacting throughout a property, all of that data. There's so many other things you can know about a person or the way they interact or want to interact with you. I think these are critical things to be gathering now. I'm curious on your perspective of this, but it seems like this is things that you should start gathering now because for whatever capabilities you may have in the future, in a few years, you're going to want to look back and say, OK, we already have been collecting this stuff and we're ready to start using it.

Martin: Yeah, totally. The first thing I would say is just clean up the data you have because they have a lot of data. But it's just, you know, literally, I went somewhere and they said, oh, you've been here before. I said, actually, I have not. And they, you know, just done a massive merge of all the Martin Solers, and there had been several. And, you know, we're sending my stuff to the wrong email address. And I'm like, come on, guys, seriously. But okay, the first thing is to clean up the data that you have. You have data, get it together, and bring it into some kind of a system. That's where CRM will definitely help. It's going to force you to start putting it together. Once you have that, that's already a really good place to be because most hotels don't have that in order. Once you start having that in order, you can start adding more preferences. I think I gave an example. If someone's been in a room that has a bathtub three times, that's not necessarily because they want that. It might be just because that was the last thing that was available. Then you want to start knowing what they prefer and what they would like and so on. But then you've got to keep in mind that that's only about 9% of your guests. There's only about 9% of your guests who will come back to popular cities unless it's corporate guests who spend more. Corporate guests are ready to spend more per night. On average, it's only about 9%. So it's not like you're selling consumables where this saying is once you've got the customer there, you're good. No, not in hospitality. You've got to be out getting 91% of your customers over again, and you again, and again, and again.

Josiah: I appreciate that perspective because not only are you a former hotelier, but you've also built direct-to-consumer businesses. And so you understand how that world works as well. And I think as much as it's often helpful for hoteliers to think about how we get people to come back, the numbers are the numbers in terms of how the return frequency at many hotels. So I think as I'm hearing you say that, what I'm thinking about is, OK, what can I collect in the booking process or in some first interactions where I can make that first-time stay as personalized as possible? It's like, yes, we want to build the profiles, but we also want to create a good first experience as well.

Martin: Yeah. And that's where I think interaction with the guests in advance happens, right? To find out if they're coming with the family, in a smooth way, you could ask a few questions, this is anniversary, already knowing if it's business or pleasure, if it's family or not, finding out a few Tiny things like that you could do with a chat, with a text, with a messaging system like that. And you could ask a couple of questions without it becoming a survey, because nobody really loves to fill out yet another survey. No, but you could ask a few questions like that and suddenly have a lot more. What's the occasion? I remember it was a painful survey to do or to analyze, but we had in one of the companies we were selling men's care products, and I asked the question, why did you buy it? It was such an open question that all the answers were horrible because every answer was completely different. But it gave us so much insight. Suddenly we saw things we never knew. It was just one question. And it was not mandatory, and we would just say it out all the time and say, why'd you get this? Not more than that. It was like, oh, it was, there was beard care. It's like, oh, because, my wife wanted me to get a better beard or because during COVID we started, that's when we discovered people were growing a lot of beards over COVID and now needed material to take care of it and tools and so on. So, but it was like, now I don't have to go to the office so I can grow a beard. I was like, oh, good. Those were real insights. Now we know where they're at for real, right? Their first timer.

Josiah: That's powerful. What I hear from you is really powerful and applicable, I think, to hospitality because you, if you, if we're always forcing people into these multiple choice pick lists, We might not gather the nuance, and not everyone I imagine in the survey you ran in a consumer products company or in a hospitality company is going to give you a lot, but some will, right? And you might be picking up things you didn't even know to ask for.

Martin: Correct. I mean, there were so many things we didn't know..