Often when I hear notable people speak at industry events, I jot down particularly memorable things they say in a notebook. For a while now I’ve been going back to something Best Western President and CEO David Kong said during a general session at the recent NYU International Hospitality Industry Investment Conference.
He and some other executives were talking about brand loyalty. Most gave the pretty standard responses about how important loyalty is, and how it helps serve the most frequent guests, etc.
But Kong put it in a context that really stuck with me: “The evolution of loyalty is not just as a frequency program, but as a brand,” he said. “Beyond your stay, we want your time—your share of time while you’re dreaming and booking, and afterwards sharing” your trip.
He went on to cite an example about this idea that share of time is really what any person, company or brand is trying to get out of consumers in a perpetually busy, time-strapped world, and that example was Netflix. Earlier this year the streaming service released data showing that the average individual Netflix subscriber spent 586 hours watching the service in 2015, equating to an hour and 33 minutes per day.
I don’t know about you, but I know a LOT of people who spend a lot more time than that binge-watching Netflix, but his point was time is each person’s most valuable and finite resource. After all, we can’t change the fact that each day only has 24 hours in it, so that time supply has a lot of demand for it.
The point he made is once customers are loyal to your brand, they won’t need to spend extra time researching options and can confidently book quickly with the brand they trust.
It makes so much sense.
And yet, where this idea loses steam is when you consider that so much research shows that the path to purchase a hotel is lengthening. As just one example in a sea of many, Sojern’s 2015 Hotel Insights Report showed that Americans spent 25% more time researching hotels to book than they did flights, and that overall research time booking hotels keeps growing year over year.
But let’s consider this—numbers may show that people are spending more time researching, but do we know what their feelings are while they’re researching? I mean, who really loves that exercise? All I know is that when I’m researching a big purchase, I get grumpy. After a while, I say to myself, “All right, I’m narrowing it down to three options and choosing from just those three because I am not spending ANY more time on this nonsense and I need to go watch ‘Orange is the New Black’ on Netflix for one hour and 33 minutes!”
So coming back to time, I agree with Kong. I think it’s the magic element in this equation. If you can inspire enough trust and loyalty in customers so they feel confident booking with you and not spending time researching for a lower price somewhere else, then that’s it. You win.
I’d love to hear how you’re maximizing the finite time your guests and potential customers have. Leave a comment below. Or you can email me at sricca@hotelnewsnow.com or find me on Twitter @HNN_Steph.
Share of the week
I’ve been writing this blog for exactly one year this week, and so I’m doing a #TBT to my first blog, where I lamented the Cleveland Cavaliers’ game six loss in the 2015 NBA Finals to the Golden State Warriors. It was all in the context of loyalty—even if LeBron lost, I could still be loyal, just like how all true brand loyalists know that it’s about more than just product delivery or just service that keeps them coming back.
Anyway, you can understand my joy today, one year later, to be celebrating my team’s epic game seven win. No, it has nothing to do with hotels (other than the fact that every single room in a downtown we’re worried about oversupplying was sold out for yesterday’s celebratory parade). But the article I’d like to share with you here is entirely about loyalty. This time, it’s loyalty to a city. Read on for NBC Sports columnist Joe Posnanski’s take on “Titles and Tears.”
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