First Impressions Matter More Than You Think
What happens when your contactless guest experience lacks a strong first impression?
Staff Fighting Your Tech: Your digital check‑in is just as vital as your physical front lobby now. When you create friction at any point during digital check-in it drives abandonment, ruins pre‑stay upsell potential, pushes wasted labor to the front desk, and raises net operating costs. Staff end up fighting your systems instead of elevating the warm welcome your guests want which ultimately reduces NPS growth alongside your ability to create higher spend per guest.
Losing Brand Integrity: A generic pre‑arrival flow that's treated as a transaction suppresses your opportunity to show the guest you know them, and affirm they were wise in choosing your brand over the competition. Without a connected brand experience during check-in that recognises the guest alongside their loyalty, you outright weaken your whatever brand promise they bought into.
A Weakened Tech Stack by Design: Contactless technologies that are patch-worked together as an afterthought create gaps for failure. When each system for each contactless milestone is developed, adopted, or maintained insolation, you miss out on significant net operating income improvement. Without a tech stack that acts like a platform because it was designed that way, you increase the rate of failures like ID verification issues, chargeback exposure, and failed payment capturing for pre-auths. That means refunds, disputes, bad reviews, and higher acquisition costs before a single night posts.
What are global leaders doing?
They aren't looking at tech in isolation anymore...
Better Context = Better Content
Leaders in the space deeply understand the valuable opportunity to start digital guest engagement early. During an age where email marketing just doesn’t cut it anymore, the best hotels are personalising greetings by embracing what omnichannel really means. By leveraging contextual information in each guest's profile, the best hoteliers are using a singular platform of contactless technology to push out the right upsell or ancillary offer during check-in, in real-time, on the guest's preferred channel, and in preferred medium.
Segmentation Is as Important as Timing
Innovating hoteliers are adopting technologies that directly connect their digital check-in tools into their guest experience engagement tools. That way they can capture critical guest data to effectively segment the right offerings to the right guests at the right time. When executed this way, digital check-ins shift the relationship with your hotel guests from transactional to transformational, improving overall guest service. The benefit also increases repeat business as guests trust in your ability to offer a seamless experience.
Letting Guests Decide the Terms
Hotels that deepy understand their guests know that guests want to experience their hospitality journey with technology that doesn't force their experience. This means more options and flexibility to let guests decide what to do on their terms. The most profitable hotels let guests check-in, collect payment methods, check IDs, and more whether the guests wants to do so at the front desk, on a branded app, or from a web browser on the guest's phone.
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What you will learn from the Alliants playbook
