Hotels and hostels must build a strong reputation by offering a great guest experience and outstanding customer communication. Delivering a top-notch customer experience will help you grow your brand and it will help you create more successful marketing campaigns to convince more visitors to come. The word travels fast among friends and even faster online; according to Statista’s current numbers, nearly 40% of hotel guests are likely to leave an online review after a positive experience and they tend to be detailed ones. 

According to several hotel industry reports, travelers prefer the same hotels/hostels more often than not, provided they’re revisiting the same place, or if it’s a whole different town, city, or country, they immediately seek the same hotel chain to have a similar experience. Expedia’s post-pandemic survey suggests 59% of travelers are willing to spend more to improve their trips if they’re satisfied with the service the hotel provides. It all comes down to delivering an exceptional guest experience in order to improve your hotel or hostel’s performance and maximize its revenue. 

As a manager or owner, you need to invest in the right tools and technology to better understand how your hotel is performing; you need to know who your customers are, and what they need and want from your place. The digital world has many reliable analytics tools to provide visitor data, but the story slightly changes for the physical world. You need reliable and extremely accurate visitor analytics technology for the real world so that you can get near-perfect data for your hotels (or hostels) and deliver the best traveler experience. The right technology can transform your hotel’s data into actionable insights and visualize the information in an easy-to-understand way.

Modern people counting technologies will allow you to track real-time visitor traffic, paint a clear picture of your guests’ needs, and optimize facility management per different zones like food courts, restaurants, casinos, and other common areas. You’ll be able to better optimize your staff to deliver the best guest experience you can within your power and also save on energy bills by tracking zones.

Does Your Hotel (or Hostel) Really Need People Counting?

Hotels and hostels should always aim for an authentic and safe experience in order to build a strong name and ensure future success. Having a definitive edge over your competitors can make all the difference for your business, especially considering how the pandemic changed traveler behavior to spend more on cleanliness, health, and safety. 

Traffic counting and visitor analytics are no strangers to the industry, but most hotels and hostels still use outdated counting technologies with low accuracy. You can’t build a campaign based on unreliable data, you need facts and actionable insights to see what opportunities lie ahead and how your hotel can leverage them. Any traffic counter that’s not powered by 3D active stereo vision technology is prone to major errors, and most of them come with a generic online dashboard that’s more often than not confusing rather than helpful.

Therefore, the answer is yes, your business can leverage traffic counting and visitor analytics, but only if you invest in the right technology and brand. You should do detailed research and find the most cost-effective provider that suits your business’s needs. The ideal people counting technology will help you keep an accurate real-time count of people in your common areas and provide you with a customizable online dashboard that can generate reports in a variety of ways. 

How Can Hotels and Hostels Leverage Guest Counting?

You need not cover every single corner of your hotel or hostel. For the most part, you need traffic counting sensors placed at entrances to your facilities. The information you’ll gain by having the right sensor at the right entrance can make all the difference to optimize your costs and satisfy your guests.

Casinos

Installing people counters at entrances will enable you to accurately count people coming in and out of your casinos, giving you key insights into learning guest behaviors. Real-time people counting will also help you ensure you follow your government’s health and safety regulations easily. 

Hotels can also use traffic counters to divert the workforce to other areas and give the security staff some breathing room. Your security staff can focus on more important things like providing a safe environment and validating that guests are 18 or older. 

You can also detect which entrances are used more often, or even if some entrances are needed in the first place if they’re not being actively used. This will again let you allocate your staff, redirect other resources and provide you with healthy visitor data.

Restaurants and Food Courts

Placing a precise visitor counter at the entrance of your food courts and restaurants can help you immensely in reducing the waste of food and resources. A decrease in food waste is not only beneficial for the environment because it reduces the need for diesel-powered waste haulers, resource consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions, but can also save your hotel a ton of money. 

Set a time frame for your food courts and restaurants, gather healthy and reliable information, learn guest behavior, and compare month-to-month data to significantly reduce food waste and excess spending.

Gyms and Pools

Most hotels provide their visitors with gyms, pools, and some other entertainment options and these places can become overcrowded in the flash of an eye. There are serious health risks associated with overcrowding and on top of that, overcrowded common areas lead to negative hotel experiences. Per Statista’s post-covid hotel industry report, nearly 50% of guests are likely to leave a review in detail if their experience is negative.

A reliable and accurate traffic counter will help you detect in advance when your common areas pull the heaviest guest attendance and take precautions. The result will be a more effective staff allocation and a reduction in costs.

Hotel Lobbies

Each hotel or hostel needs a unique plan to eliminate queues in lobbies. Guests are often tired after traveling and they rarely are in the mood to wait for check-in. Unless there’s an event nearby your area, your guest numbers will likely follow a pattern, one that you need to be able to identify and manage your resources accordingly. 

Hotel guests who wait for long times to check in or check out will almost always mention this bit in their reviews or in their talks with friends, even if the overall experience is a positive one. You can deploy a people counter at the lobby and learn about your guests’ manners. Having actionable data on guest behavior will immensely help you in handling guests who are waiting for their room to get ready, and even let you spot how often guests arrive at your hotel or hostel early and how they prefer killing time.

Conclusion

V-Count’s people counting sensors deliver the highest accuracy on the market with 99% and all sensors come with our in-house developed, cloud-powered, customizable visitor analytics tool. If you’re running a hotel or hostel chain, we even offer tools and solutions for performance comparison.

Reach out to us now for a demo and we’ll connect you with one of our people counting experts. Let’s find out what your hotel needs and help you maximize your revenue!