Guest experience: Definition, trends, & best practices

The guest experience can make or break whether a guest returns. Explore the ways that organizations can use guest experience as a key factor of their success in the hospitality industry.

What is guest experience?

Guest experience is the cumulative effect of every interaction a guest has with your business. In a hotel setting, this journey begins with the booking process and continues through to checkout – ideally leading to a rebooking for their next stay.

To encourage repeat visits, the experience must consistently meet or exceed their expectations. Hospitality businesses do this by optimizing each interaction across the entire guest journey. It starts with understanding guest needs and how best to fulfill them, followed by continuous monitoring and improvement of every touchpoint.

Delivering a best-in-class guest experience requires proactive management of guest satisfaction. By gathering feedback and measuring guest satisfaction, you can uncover areas for improvement and take action to elevate the overall stay.

In hospitality, a great guest experience is a proven driver of positive reviews, increased loyalty, and repeat bookings.

The importance of guest experience

In every sector and industry, businesses succeed or fail based largely on the quality of their customer experience. Similarly, guest experience often outweighs competitive pricing – many guests are willing to pay a premium for memorable, personalized service and a seamless booking and stay.

Once your brand becomes known for delivering exceptional guest experiences, you can command higher prices. In fact, luxury and indulgence purchases carry a 13% price premium when paired with a positive overall experience.

Positive guest experiences also drive repeat business. Studies show that customers spend up to 140% more after a positive experience compared to a negative one, and brands that consistently deliver outstanding service enjoy over 5x the revenue of those that don’t.

Today’s guests have an abundance of choices at their fingertips. With countless apps and booking platforms, including online travel agencies, it’s more challenging than ever for hospitality brands to stand out. This makes a strong reputation and positive word of mouth more critical than ever.

In short, guest experience can be the difference between a fully booked calendar or fading into obscurity.

Guest experience trends

Guest experience is an ever-evolving discipline shaped by changing expectations. Hospitality brands need to leverage data from their experience management software and stay ahead of shifting industry trends that define what guests expect.

1. Technology is now end-to-end in guest experience

Wi-Fi alone is no longer sufficient. Whether it’s to support daily technology use, improve service efficiency, or provide seamless entertainment in guest rooms, technology has become a vital part of the hospitality experience.

There has been a surge in travel apps, mobile-optimized booking channels, and increased demand for instant messaging that connects guests directly with hotel management.

Apps are increasingly used to manage various guest interactions, helping to create a more seamless and organized experience. Research shows that 80% of hotel guests would willingly download a hotel app that enables them to check in, check out, and stay informed throughout their stay.

2. Personalized communication is key

Membership details, vacation ideas, or personal offers that are in line with guest preferences and expectations help to create a feeling of belonging – and ensure each stay is remembered positively.

This can be as simple as using someone’s name in the subject line of an email, or it might be offering them their own landing page on your website. What’s key is ensuring your message focuses on what’s useful to the individual guest. Family-friendly activity ideas, for example, aren’t going to be relatable for a couple on a romantic getaway.

3. Employee experience is connected to guest experience

Guests are far less likely to have a positive, memorable, and on-brand experience if your hotel employees aren’t adequately trained or empowered.

High employee turnover and low employee engagement add risk to the guest experience – with downstream impact on both individual stays and long-term positive reputation. Remember: training costs are only high when employee turnover is high. If your existing team members are engaged and supported, they’ll stay motivated – and stay onboard for longer.

4. Guests expect an omnichannel journey

It’s more important than ever for hospitality businesses to provide smooth transitions, personalized support, and differentiated value as guests move across physical, digital, social, and third-party channels. This omnichannel hopping – often called "phygital” – is the new norm. And success means being able to bridge the gaps between those touchpoints so that things feel seamless.

A journey might start with booking online with a third-party booking site like Expedia, followed by a DM to the hotel’s Instagram account for support, and end with using the hotel’s app to check updates and use loyalty points. The positive guest experience comes from making the guest feel like they’re not starting from scratch with each touchpoint.

To facilitate this, property and location managers need insights and tools that drive consistency, efficiency, and create memorable stay experiences that keep guests coming back.

5. Reputation matters more than ever

Guests are more carefully considering how and where to spend their money. Today’s abundance of online reviews makes it easy to evaluate options, while a lack of personalized, timely responses can harm your brand reputation.

Hospitality businesses therefore need to invest in tools that can scour the web for guest feedback – positive and negative – and help support staff respond effectively. Bonus points if your software can provide enough guest data to help make that response personal. That could be, for example, thanking someone for a great review, and surfacing insight that the stay was booked for their honeymoon – then wishing them a memorable one.

Embracing omnichannel in guest experience

We’ve already touched on the concept of ‘phygital’ experiences, but it’s important to understand that these guest journeys seamlessly move back and forth between both physical and digital channels.

Guests might contact you about their stay in person, via email, through apps, over the phone, or on social media platforms. At the same time, your business needs to manage bookings across all these channels, ensuring that every interaction feels cohesive and integrated.

The key to managing this effectively is deploying software that bridges the gap between physical location management and the digital world of customer communications and support. For example, the Qualtrics Location Experience Hub simplifies this process by using AI to interpret messages, record in-person interactions, and consolidate all interaction data into a single, unified source of truth. This enables you to:

• Respond with context from previous interactions
• Anticipate needs and address issues before they escalate
• Identify trends and fix pain points
• Deliver personalized, relevant messaging
• Make each guest feel valued

Best practices to improve guest experience

What can your organization do to improve guest experience? Start with these strategies:

Understand the end-to-end guest journey

Whilst omnichannel interactions may seem random, your guests are actually traveling a fairly linear journey. The guest experience journey is multifaceted, and each stage has its own goals, needs, and outcomes:

Collect guest experience feedback at every touchpoint

Designing the guest experience is essential, but so is taking steps to continually improve it. As guest expectations evolve, so should your approach.

With 58% of travelers basing their hotel decision on the helpfulness of customer service, proactively addressing pain points can mean the difference between winning or losing bookings. This is why collecting guest feedback before, during and after stays helps you assess what’s working, what isn’t, and where to invest next.

Some leading hotel brands are already putting this into action. For example, Hilton uses Qualtrics’ AI-enabled tools to gather and analyze feedback across the entire guest journey – from pre-arrival to checkout. By capturing input at each stage and analyzing it for effort, sentiment, and emotion, Hilton can identify experience gaps and make targeted improvements to enhance guest satisfaction at scale.

“We’re modernizing how we listen to customers, how we analyze their feedback, and how we close the loop with them – resolving their pain points in the moment, while they are still at our hotels.”

-Becky Polebaum, Vice President of Enterprise and Customer Analytics at Hilton

Measure the guest experience with CX metrics

To start measuring and improving the guest experience, consider tracking key metrics:

• Net Promoter Score: Net Promoter Score asks guests how likely they are to recommend your business to a friend. This score provides valuable insight into the emotional connection guests have with your brand – a key driver of loyalty. It also highlights whether you need to take action to improve loyalty and helps measure the effectiveness of those efforts.
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Customer Satisfaction Score measures guest satisfaction with individual touchpoints, services, or products. Guests rate their experience on a scale from 1 (very unsatisfied) to 5 (very satisfied). This feedback offers a clear overview of what’s working well and identifies areas needing improvement.
• Open-ended feedback: Open text fields allow guests to share feedback freely on any topic, including areas not covered by the survey questions. This can uncover valuable insights that structured surveys might miss.

Take action on your insights

Here’s how to translate data into better experiences:

• Smart Routing: Automatically share insights from guest interactions with the right stakeholders (e.g. via Slack or workflow tools). This makes it easier to act on feedback – whether it’s about the restaurant menu, spa service, or check-in system.
• Update policies and train staff: Identify journey gaps where service could be improved. This might mean policy updates, staff training, or investing in new hires to elevate the guest experience.
• Manage your online reputation: Feedback from review sites in a goldmine. Use reputation management tools to monitor online review platforms in real time, to make sure you’re addressing positive and negative feedback that is being shared to potential guests.

Bring it all together

Ultimately, today’s hospitality leaders need to deliver personalized, connected experiences across every touchpoint – from an app to the front desk. Doing so effectively requires a guest experience management tool.

The Qualtrics Location Experience Hub helps brands manage experience data at the location level, with an intuitive dashboard that surfaces real-time insights.

That includes:

• A unified view of customer feedback
• Location-specific feedback from surveys and online reviews
• Sentiment analysis with actionable recommendations

With Qualtrics, you can sort the signal from the noise and uncover new insights to create memorable guest experiences, provide exceptional service, and ensure guest satisfaction.