Do Hotels need a Content Management System for their Content Management Systems?
Most hotels have amazing local knowledge. However, chances are, very little is being done with it. Which is a shame. Because there are a LOT of ways it could be used it to improve the guest’s experience (and the hotel’s bottom line).
Useful, personalised information about things like the best way to navigate the city, and what to do while you are in town can be the difference between good trip and a great trip, so why not offer it before it’s asked for?
We all know the power of social media and SEO when it comes to driving direct bookings. What if there was a way to generate social media & website content with little to no effort?
It could be possible. All that is needed is a sensible way to organise and share hotels’ local knowledge across different systems.
The below diagram demonstrates some the different types of information a hotel typically has, and just some of the many ways it could be used.
As you can see, there is a huge overlap between different systems, meaning that the same information can potentially be repurposed in multiple ways.
However, at the moment one of three things is happening:
A) Someone is putting huge amounts of time and effort into inputting and updating the same content in multiple places.
B) Guests are receiving incorrect information, as content gets out of date.
or
C) Hotels aren’t availing of lots of interesting systems due to the amount of extra (not to mention tedious) work it generates.
Scenario A is terrible for the hotel as it is inefficient and tedious.
Scenario B is terrible for the guest as they have a sub-par experience.
Scenario C is terrible for everyone, but especially the tech vendors whose brilliant, innovative solutions hotels are not using.
The situation is even more ludicrous when you consider that much of the work — actually creating the content, has already been done.
In most cases, a hotel’s local knowledge doesn’t just live in the brains of the concierge and front desk staff, it has already been written down — in template email and SMS replies, social media posts, the welcome booklet, the local guide on the in-room tv or tablet, blog posts, Instagram posts, chatbot CMSs etc, etc, etc.
The problem is that because there is no one central repository for all this information, much of it gets forgotten about. And because it lives in too many places to keep track of, it doesn’t get updated.
This is a shame, because as much as people want a comfortable bed, great shower and super-fast wifi, they want local knowledge.
Consider Airbnb’s brand proposition ‘live like a local’. They have created a billion dollar business out of convincing people that by staying in a stranger’s spare room they are having an ‘authentic experience’.
People have a real need and desire to connect with the place that they are visiting. I would argue that, done right, technology can often be the best way to deliver this information.
But what about personal service?
I’ve heard a lot about how people want personal service, not more and more automation, and sure, who doesn’t love the idea of the mythical amazing concierge who can recommend the perfect place to for any occasion. If only the infuriatingly oblivious person standing in front of you would quit with the incessant and weirdly detailed questions about train timetables and the pros and cons of travelling by bus vs train…
Sometimes you just want to be able to find the information you need yourself. Or, even better, have it offered to you without you even having to ask for it.
And as compelling as the ‘personal service’ argument is, it’s only really relevant while guests are in-house. But what about the pre-arrival experience? Part of the joy of travel is in the planning and anticipation. Thinking about the places that you are going to see, and the food that you are going to eat (or is that just me?). Hotels know their guests, and they know their local area. They know the best way to travel to the hotel, and how the local public transport system works. They know the cool places to visit, and the best places to eat. So why are they waiting to be asked before they share all this amazing local information with them?
Why doesn’t every hotel website have a local guide populated with the kind of places they know their customers like to go?
If it’s possible to do things like use browsing behaviour, social media footprint and AI to personalise websites & booking engines, why not use it to create genuinely useful and engaging pre-arrival emails, using content the hotel has already created?
How great would it be for business travellers to be sent an email telling them about the best places to have a meeting, or for fitness fanatics to be told about great routes to go for a run, or a hot new Pilates studio?
What’s good for the guest is good for the bottom line
The obvious answer is because offering all this local knowledge doesn’t add to the bottom line, in the way that the typical pre-arrival up-sell email offering early check-ins and bottles of champagne does.
In my opinion that argument is flawed. If a hotel can improve a guest’s trip by pro-actively offering them useful transport information and local recommendations, the guest will start enjoying their trip even before they arrive. And if the information they get improves the experience they have traveling to the hotel and while staying there, that is going to show up in reviews — and I don’t think that anyone would argue that reviews don’t affect the bottom line.
And I didn’t even mention that if guests can find the information they need without having to ask staff for it, it’s possible to give a great service without huge staff costs.
And then there’s social media…
A recent survey says that 73% of millennials check the hotel’s social media feed before booking, and 33% would be put off booking altogether if it had no social media presence. No pressure, but your social media strategy better be up to scratch.
The need to produce content for social media is relentless. Wouldn’t it be great if hotels had a repository of up to date, pre-approved, original content, written in their brand tone of voice, and tailored to their guest’s preferences, that it could use to quickly and easily generate Instagram posts featuring great places to go, or ‘Top 5 vegan restaurants’ blog posts. Oh wait…
And then there’s SEO…
Given that useful, well written, original content is the original, and still best SEO strategy, a good city guide and blog is a no-brainer for any hotel that wants to drive organic traffic to their website. And the better the content, the more of a chance that that organic traffic (or indeed any traffic — including people who have discovered the hotel on an OTA, then nipped over for more information) will stick around, and the more of a chance there is to convert them with live chat, or well-placed calls to action.
And then there’s the benefit to on-site staff…
Not every hotel has a dedicated concierge whose job it is to know where to recommend. And even in hotels that do, what if a guest asks another member of staff? Not everyone can, or will, know a great halal restaurant, the nearest place to buy a SIM card, where to bring a business colleague for lunch, where does a good margarita, how to buy a public transport travel card, the best place to go for a run, etc, etc, etc. So why not make this information easy for staff to access, as well as guests? That way, if a guest asks for a recommendation, they have a reply on tap, and can send it to the guest’s phone with a few clicks.
Given all of the above, it seems crazy that it’s currently so hard for hotels to share their local knowledge across the systems they use, or would potentially like to use.
So what’s the solution?
Introducing the LKMS
Because every good idea needs an acronym, let’s call this central repository for a hotel’s local knowledge a ‘Local Knowledge Management System’ or LKMS. It seems to me that having a LKMS would good for everyone:
Good for guests
- They would get accurate, relevant information that would make their stay better — without even having to ask for it.
Good for hotels
- Improved guest satisfaction = improved reviews = improved bottom line.
- Local knowledge could be repurposed in lots of different ways, making it worthwhile to invest in producing high quality content.
- They would feel in control of their content as it would be straightforward to maintain and keep up to date.
- They would be able to quickly and easily try out new technologies. (Availing of a free trial is anything but free. It can take a week of work just to upload and configure content into a new CMS. If it doesn’t work out, it’s a colossal waste of time and resources. And even if it does work out, you now have a whole new set of content that you have to keep up to date).
Good for tech vendors
- It would encourage trial and reduce customer acquisition costs. (It takes hours to demo a product, set up a free trial, respond to questions, and assist with uploading and configuring content. And even if all goes well, the deal can still be far from being in the bag, as buy-in may still be needed from others in the organisation, who may feel that they could do without the hassle of all the extra work that introducing a new technology will inevitably generate. After all, they have always got along just fine without it…)
Is keeping content up to date really such a big deal?
Yes.
Content is not static, it’s constantly changing.
To give an example, the most popular taxi app in Dublin is (currently) called FreeNow. A few months ago it was called MyTaxi. Two years ago it was called Hailo. Obviously they should have stuck with Hailo.
But that’s not the issue.
The issue is that, simply by trying to give its guests a great experience, a hotel could end up having to store information about that app in lots of different systems. And if (when?) Hailo/ MyTaxi/ FreeNow/ WhatEverNameTheyComeUpWithNext decides it’s time for another rebrand, someone in the hotel has to log into all those different systems to change the name. Again. Which is tedious and time consuming.
Every day restaurants close. New ones open. Apps change their name. Bus fares go up. New bike/ scooter/ car share schemes are launched/ go bust.
The more ways that the hotel is sharing information, the more places it has to go to update it. The email templates, the in-room tablet, the website, the in-room tv guide and tablet, the chatbot, the SMS messaging system, Alexa, etc, etc.
With the best will in the world, this becomes super tiresome, super-fast.
Best case scenario- occasional mistakes will be made.
Worst case scenario- staff feel like they are fighting a losing battle and simply give up trying to keep the information up to date.
So although a hotel may in theory be keen to add a new way to share its local knowledge with its guests, and although it may already have much, if not all, of the content it needs to populate the new technology’s CMS, it might very well come to the conclusion that it’s just not worth the trouble.
Which is not great if you are trying to sell the technology to the hotel.
Outsourcing Content — Don’t Do It!
I’ve noticed that some vendors have tried to get around the content problem by bundling their own content with their technology. However, as seductive as the idea of taking all that work off your table might be, in practice it’s just not a good idea.
To give an example, I was greatly amused by the city guide for Dublin that came bundled with an in-room tablet solution I recently demo-ed, as it was so blatantly obvious that whoever had written it had never stepped foot in the country, let alone our fair city. I would not have been so amused had our reception team been relying on it to make recommendations to our guests, however. Which begs the question, if they can’t be trusted to get the information they are providing correct in the first place, how on earth could they be trusted to keep it up to date?
And in any case, why would I want to offer my guests the same content as the hotel around the corner? And what about our brand tone of voice? That is not something that I ever want to outsource, and it’s certainly not something I want to share with our competitors.
To my mind it’s just as important that a hotel’s recommendations are ‘on brand’, as it is that the interior decor or website design is. A recommendation is an interaction between the hotel and guest, in just the same way that any ‘in person’ communication is. Therefore it’s essential that it’s given just as much consideration as any other part of the customer experience.
What would a LKMS look like?
This isn’t a revolutionary concept. In fact it (kind of) already exists.
At a very basic level there are Store Locator plugins for e-commerce websites (like Storepoint) that allow you to sync data from a Google Sheet to their CMS. However, given the various different types of content required by the many different systems that could potentially plug into a hospitality focused LKMS, a more sophisticated UX than a Google Sheet would be preferable.
There are systems known as ‘Headless / Decoupled CMSs’ (such as Contentful) that allow you to store all of your content in one CMS, and then share it with whichever systems you like via an API.
So if Headless / Decoupled CMSs are already a thing, what’s the issue? The problem is that you still need a developer to build the API link from the Headless/ Decoupled CMS to each system you want to use, so you have to be pretty clear that you want to add a new system to your tech stack before you are going to go to all that trouble and expense. And what if a new, better system comes along? Either you stick with the inferior system, or it’s more time, and more money down the drain…
Ideally there would be a hospitality focused Headless/ Decoupled CMS, pre-configured to suit the needs of hotels, with its own App Store/ Marketplace of pre-connected systems (similar to the Marketplaces you find with API first PMSs). That way, hotels would be able to ‘plug and play’, making trying out new systems a breeze. It would no longer be necessary to spend hours copying and pasting content into a system, as the content would auto populate, making trying out new systems a cinch.
The way I imagine it working, each entry in the LKMS would be set up with a range of fields to suit all the different types of content that might be needed to be shared. For example a short text version for SMS messages, a longer text version for email/ on an in-room tablet, images, a link to google maps, opening hours, contact details, etc. Each system could then connect to the field or fields it requires.
It would also be possible to add tags, allowing the content to be categorised and filtered by type, allowing more useful categorisation (and therefore recommendation) like ‘pubs + beer gardens’, ‘restaurants + vegan’, ‘public transport + airport’.
Aside from being able make use of all this useful local knowledge across multiple systems, it also becomes a lot easier to manage all this content.
For example:
- a restaurant closes down
The entire entry can be deleted or disconnect, removing it from everywhere at once.
- the airport gets a new train service
It is only necessary to create a new entry in one CMS.
- an app changes its name
It’s only necessary to log into one system, update it in the relevant field or fields, and hey presto, the new name is updated everywhere.
Conclusion
A LKMS would allow hotels to crowdsource recommendations and information from staff and guests, then filter it through the person/ department with responsibility for making sure that any suggestions given by the hotel are ‘on brand’. This would make it possible to design and curate the hotel’s local knowledge and ensure that every recommendation given to guests is the one that you would hope.
It would also encourage trial and adoption of all the interesting new technologies that are springing up every day.
Headless/Decoupled CMSs exist.
Why not a LKMS tailored to the needs of hotels?
I live in hope that someday FreeNow will see the light and revert to calling itself Hailo, and when that day finally comes, I’m only going to have to log into one place to make the change.
Can’t someone make that happen?
Please?
