The ONE hire you're missing in your hospitality business

I want to be giggled. I want to laugh. If you want to win this amazing prize, then you got to make sure you make me laugh, Okay? You will also notice on the stage that I have got a bottle of tequila, some sweets, and we'll ignore the bottle of water for time being. But I want to introduce everybody to something that I've been trying to spread around the world for the past year. And this is called the STR shot. Okay? So please feel free to take it with you after this event and go around the world and spread this shot. So I'm going to walk you through every component of the STR shot, and we're going to start off with S, which is sweets. Now, Damien, Sugar. Sorry. Damien very kindly likes to put me on after lunch when I come to these events. And I know what it's like after lunch. We've got people that are starting to fall asleep. People just had a bit of carbs, are feeling a little bit sleepy. So I think, what better way of getting you all excited by giving you some Worby's originals. Now, unfortunately, I have only got half of what's in this room. I underestimated how many is going to be here. So this is what I need for you to do. I need for you to stand up. Everybody, you're going to look to your left or look to your right, and you're going to find an opponent and you're going to play a game of rock, paper, scissor, shoot. The rules is this, it's first one to win, okay? When you win, stay stood up. Off you go. Turn to your left. Turn to your right. Rock, paper, scissors, shoot. All right. All right, then. Do we have some winners? If you are a winner, stay stood up. Abigail, can you do me a favor and just pass these around the table? All right, for those of you our winners, give yourselves a round of applause. So Abigail, my very nice assistant, is handing out sweets. If we run out of sweets, everybody pile on to Touch Day at the back because they've got a bowl of them. And I said, hey, if I thought you've got sweets, by the end of this, go to Touch Day and they will give you the sweets. So Taihan at the back will give you them. So, S, by the way, you can sit down. You don't have to spell like you have to stand up. S is sugar. Now, remember that in the STR shot, the next step is the tequila. Now, I haven't got a shot glass, and so they gave me a wine glass. So I gotta be careful here because otherwise, I'll be on the floor after this. And I'll come back to that in a second. So what are we talking about today? The one hire that you are all missing out on in your business. This one hire will boost profits and boost five star reviews. This one hire is called the Guest Success Manager. In a world that is becoming very quickly obsessed. Have we got some sweets left? Thank you very much. We've got some left. In a world that is becoming very obsessed with AI ChatGPT and all these robots that are going to take over, as Neelie talked about earlier, we need to, in our world of hospitality, think of ways when everybody's zigging, how can we zag? If anybody was here yesterday during the touchday workshop, you will know that we talked about communication with our guests. And again, we all want to have the easy life of not having to answer guest questions and want a robot to answer everything. But if you think about it, what we talk about here, boosting five star reviews and boosting profits. When it comes to what we're selling, we're selling a hospitality product. And one thing that I've been testing this year, we've tested this out with a company in the Poconos in America and they've hired a person to do this role. And it's. And it's working really well. And basically what it boils down to is the Guest Success Manager is somebody that is going to communicate with your guests throughout after the booking process. So as soon as they've booked with you to the point of arrival, and this isn't an AI bot, this isn't an email, isn't a text. This is picking up the phone and having a conversation, a human one on one conversation. We are going to get to a case and point in time in the very near future that every single digital message that you receive online, you are going to be unsure if it was a human, authentic or a robot. And at the moment, AI is disrupting business level. But in turn, very soon it's going to become at the guest level, at the public level, where everybody is going to be impacting them in some way, shape or form. So for those of you that are in the room who maybe don't have the budget to hire, then this is something that you can test. And like I said, we've been testing this with a company in the Poconos and it's working really well. There's three main touch points that I want to talk about now. If you missed Tian's talk yesterday and she went through her communication pipeline with a guest. It is very extensive and it is done with emails and handwritten notes, which is fantastic. This is something that I would love to add into it that will help improve guest experience and relationship. So the first main touch point is 24 hours after the booking, you call the guest. Now, when you're calling the guest, it's not to sell a product because you've already got the sale, you know you've already got the booking. What it's there to do is to do a couple of things. Number one, introduce yourself. Number two is to do a mini survey. But number three is find out why they are coming to stay with you. And again, I know what some of you are thinking in the room is, well, my demographic might not want a phone call, et cetera. If you want to pivot this and change this to maybe a voice note or a video message, you can do. But a phone call is best because you get direct feedback. So on that phone call, the things that we're encouraging the property management company in the Poconos to do is to find out a couple of things. Number one, why are they coming to the area for their booking? So, number one, why are they coming to your area? People who really struggle with finding out who their ideal guest is. This is a really good activity to go through because you need to find out, number one, who's coming to your area, why are they coming to the area, and then why did they book with you? So it's a simple question. So, hey, who, where, why, what, when? So just a quick question. Why are you coming to our area? Why are you coming to Barcelona? And they'll tell you it's either leisure business. And again, the second follow up question is, okay, so again, why did you decide to book with us? We do all of this marketing, all of this optimization. You change your Airbnb listings, your Booking.com listings, you post all of your things on social media, you organize your direct booking website. And by the way, the talks today on direct booking websites have been phenomenal. You do all of those tweaks and changes, but, you know, you don't really know if it's working or not. Obviously you get the main data, which is the booking happens. But if you can actually ask the people that are actually making, you know, giving you the transaction, giving you the money, being your guest, that question, they'll give you the data back. So again, the second question is, so why did you book with us? Who, where, why what when questions. And then the final one is, are they Celebrating anything? Is it a special occasion? Is it a birthday, an anniversary? Are they coming for a wedding? Now, with those three questions, again, it doesn't have to be more than five minutes. It doesn't have to be a 30, 40 minute conversation. It's just a quick conversation. But with those three questions, you can uncover everything that you and your company need to know. Now, from one person alone, you're not going to get the data that you need. But over 5, 10, 15, 20 conversations, this data will start to gather up. And the truth is always in the data that is presented in front of you. So out of 10 people, if eight people are saying we booked with you because of one reason, then that is that one reason that you need to be honing in on the talk after me is by the fantastic Heather Bay. And she's going to be talking about narrowing down on your niche. And this is going to go really coincide really nicely with it. But you've got to be able to go on your data and why people are booking with you. That will help give you that information that you need to move towards it. So, for example, we tested this with a company in the Poconos, but we're also testing this with a company, a property owner with one property in Orlando. His property is 20 minutes from Disney, 25 minutes from Universal, and he has kitted out the games room with full Avengers vibes, games rooms, the whole lot. And that is his main picture, that is on his listing sites and on his website. And we're asking these three questions. So why are you coming to Orlando? For example, why did you book with us and are you celebrating anything? So instantly what people are saying to us, we're looking at the data, we're looking at the things that are coming back, coming for, you know, spring break, holiday, birthday celebrations. They're booking with him because it's a large property, but also they saw the games room. So the data that we're getting back is fantastic. More pictures of the games room. Really focus on that. And we're very quickly developing a niche of families who are coming to Orlando. Now, I talk about how the guest success manager is fantastic for a couple of things. Boosting the reviews, but also boosting profits. Now, as business owners, as hospitality owners, we are always fixated on new money, new bookings, next booking, new customer, new clients. Every single company doesn't matter whether you're a vendor here or whether you're a hospitality owner here, you're always fixated on that new money, that new customer. When really, if you think about what you are doing. You've only got a certain amount of heads on beds. There's only a certain amount of rooms that you can fill. So many amount of people that you can accept into your property, how many bookings you can take. So the true growth and the true profit in your businesses are with the people that are already spending money with you. Now, one of the keywords that's coming out this year, and you know, obviously there's fantastic companies like Mount. I think Kennedy's here from Mount today is upsells, upsells, upsells, upsell. How can you make more profit and more money from the people that are coming to stay with you? Already now we talk about boosting profits.