Definition and Characteristics of Lifestyle Hotels
Details of Lifestyle Hotels Meeting Needs of Digital, Social and Mobile Customers
The lifestyle hotels are quite different from the traditional hotels. These types of hotels exhibit specialized characteristics or features (Zervas, Proserpio & Byers, 2017). Each and every characteristic is similar to the boutique hotel. The lifestyle hotels are unique in both in their characters and advantages. These types of lifestyle hotels are much attractive and trendy for the customers and hence these are becoming extremely popular and significant in the entire world (Hoque, 2013).
The lifestyle hotels are considered as the next generation of boutique hotels and these are eventually driven by chains. They are responsible for borrowing the better elements of boutique that are much smaller, modernized and intimate for the customers. These hotels then throw some of the most significant advantages that could only be offered by a chain of hotels. Some of the major as well as the most significant advantages of these lifestyle hotels are economies of scale, loyalty perks as well as consistency (Leung, Bai & Stahura, 2015). Another important and significant advantage of these kinds of hotels is that it is more affordable as well as accessible in comparison to the boutique hotels.
With the rise of Airbnb and rise of millennial travellers, the lifestyle hotels have become more popular for the customers (N. Torres & Kline, 2013). Amongst the popular and significant hotels, some of the most prominent and promising lifestyle hotels are Best Western Hotels and Resorts, Inter Continental Hotels Group and Choice Hotels International. There is one common factor for each of these three lifestyle hotels. They pay extra attention to the customers’ satisfaction and customers’ requirement (Fraj, Matute & Melero, 2015). There are few things that these hotels try to fulfil, which are customer expectations and customer loyalty.
For meeting the customer expectations, satisfactory ratings in surveys are to be received and within the network, the various customers’ requirements should be anticipated. To maintain the customer loyalty, these hotels provide special benefits to the loyal customers and hence they get ideas to spread their business in the entire world (Li, Ye & Law, 2013). Moreover, these lifestyle hotels even take customer feedback for improvements and ensure that the customers are satisfied in every aspect.
The lifestyle hotels always focus the distinct needs of their three types of customers (Becerra, Santaló & Silva, 2013). These three types are digital, social and mobile customers.
- i) Digital Customers: The digital requirements of the customers refers to those things, which help in complete digital transformation. The digital interactions between the customer and the respective life style hotel is the result of digital requirements of customers. When the customer is satisfied, he or she walks away with a positive experience and satisfaction (Hon, Chan & Lu, 2013). The broader area of the customer experience could eventually cover everything right from the traditional customer service channel until the newer digitalized interfaces, which the customers utilize for proper interactions.
Advantages of Lifestyle Hotels
The life style hotels mainly focuses on these new digitalized interfaces and includes the back office processes as well as the front end service optimization (Nieves & Segarra-Ciprés, 2015). Due to these optimizations, the customers are satisfied and their requirements are met substantially. They provide stellar customer services and always try to be transparent. Moreover, these lifestyle hotels try to provide high speed and convenience in the web site so that the customers do not face any issue while visiting their web site.
Another important requirement of the customer is to receive immediate services from the hotels (Jani & Han, 2014). The life style hotels ensure that none of their customers have to wait and for this purpose, they make an extremely flexible API driven enterprise architecture and hence delivering the engaging omni channel experiences.
Two important approaches are properly followed by the lifestyle hotels for fulfilling each and every digital requirement of their customers. These two significant and important approaches of the life style hotels are as follows:
- a) Focusing on the All inclusive Life Cycle of Customers: The first and the foremost approach of the life style hotels for fulfilling the customer digital requirement is by simply focusing on the all inclusive life cycle of customers (Molina-Azorín, Tarí, Pereira-Moliner, López-Gamero & Pertusa-Ortega, 2015). They provide equal attention as well as care to both digital and non digital experiences and these two types of experiences complement one another or even optimize both. This particular approach of the life style hotels eventually treat the digital requirement fulfilment of the customers as one of the basic or major strategy for customer experience.
- b) Focusing on the Customer Experience Digitally: The second distinct approach of this particular type of hotels for fulfilment of the digital requirements of customers is to focus on the several customer experiences digitally (Nieves, Quintana & Osorio, 2014). It is a better strategy of customer experience, which does not equate to the digitalized strategy of customers; experiences. The offline as well as the online customers comprise of various requirements or expectations and hence it makes the focus on the good experience of customers. The lifestyle hotels try to improvise the customer experiences or translating them to the digitalized experiences. This particular approach has higher value and it strongly depends on the audience as well as maturity of the digitalized touch points (Benavides-Velasco, Quintana-García & Marchante-Lara, 2014). The channels eventually merge or intersect in the entire journey of the customers.
- ii) Social Customers: The second important and significant type of customers in the lifestyle hotels is the social customers. These social customers are those people, who are active participants of the social media. As per a survey, around 1.4 billion people are involved in these types of social media. The voice of any social customer has subsequently proved to be extremely powerful that it could create peer review (Wu & Ko, 2013). For gaining attention and popularity from these types of social customers, the life style hotels ensure that each and every requirement of the customers are met properly without any type of issues. These lifestyle hotels follow two distinct rules in their business for satisfying the social customers. These are as follows:
- a) Social Customers Listens to the Peers: The first and the foremost technique of the life style hotels in fulfilling the requirement of their social customers is by following the fact that their customers listens to the peers (FitzPatrick, Davey, Muller & Davey, 2013). The main advantage of these types of customers is that they completely listen to their peers and hence it is necessary to fulfil the requirements of their peers as well. These social customers usually book their hotel rooms on the basis of four star or five star ratings. When the life style hotel has a poor review, it is extremely common for them to discard the hotel and look for another one. The most significant issue in this type of case is that all of these reviews are absolutely out of the hands of the life style hotels. They require to be constantly mindful for serving each and every requirement of all the customers (Narteh, Agbemabiese, Kodua & Braimah, 2013). According to a survey, over 88% customers are strongly influenced by the online comments of other customers. The weight of these social customers has effectively and efficiently grown as well as developed drastically and thus the life style hotels have focused on these customers with utmost efficiency.
- b) Unhappy Customers Notify Other Customers: The next important factor that the life style hotels try to keep in mind for the satisfaction of their social customers is that the unhappy or dissatisfied customers notify other customers about their experiences. The social customers are strongly involved with the social media and hence whenever they face any type of dissatisfied experience, they eventually share the experience with their friends or peers and those peers avoid such hotels (Karatepe & Karadas, 2015). The life style hotels often provide loyalty bonus for the customers, who are booking through social media and hence the customers book from social media. For fulfilling their requirements, these hotels also update every new feature of their services within the official website for notifying the social customers.
iii) Mobile Customers: The third type of customers of the life style hotels are the mobile customers (Karatepe, Beirami, Bouzari & Safavi, 2014). These types of customers complete their bookings through smart phones or other mobile devices. The life style hotels are responsible for incorporating the mobile applications as well as functionalities and thus could provide guest satisfaction. The number of direct bookings are eventually increased due to the user friendliness of mobile applications.
The only requirement to these types of bookings is that the customers have to download the mobile application of the hotel. These hotels add extra loyalty members for the respective programs. This is mainly because they wish to provide better guest satisfaction (Kosová, Lafontaine & Perrigot, 2013). Since, the mobile utilization has become excess ubiquitous for the guests, the major challenge that the hotels face is the persuading of the customers in booking directly.
The second challenge that the life style hotels face for the mobile customers is the ease in utilizing the mobile application (Fang, Ye & Law, 2016). For the purpose of mitigating this particular issue as well as requirement of the mobile customers, the life style hotels make their mobile application extremely user friendly, so that it is being utilized by every customer without facing any difficulty. Another significant requirement of the mobile customers is to enjoy more discount or loyalty bonus after booking (Jones, Day & Quadri-Felitti, 2013).
Popular Lifestyle Hotels
For this purpose, the lifestyle hotels have focused on their loyal customers and have provided extra discounts to those customers, who are doing their booking through mobile applications. This has helped them in incrementing their customers to a greater level. It is being noted that in 2014, only 14% of the customers used to book their rooms in life style hotels through mobile booking; however, the percentage has raised to 30% in 2018 and hence it proves that the customers are extremely satisfied with these hotels and are coming back for further services (Tsai, 2014). Moreover, these life style hotels have also added the extra functionality of messaging for their customers with the effort to make their application quite functional and useful.
2. Lifestyle Hotels Delivering Distinctive Customer Experience with the Ever Evolving Traveller
The lifestyle hotels have gained momentum within the current years and thus has evolved to the established category of hotels (Weinstein & Cahill, 2014). Lifestyle hotels are responsible for bringing more creativity and innovation in the hotel industry. The customers’ demands have slowly geared towards the core desire to all types of unique experiences on the basis of originality, design, cultural connectivity and authenticity. Due to the stimulation of diversified as well as innovative movement, the respective travel and tourism industry is enhanced by the sense of style and belonging (Cheng, Tang, Shih & Wang, 2016). This type of hotels offer most of the services, which are ancillary and they focus on the life enrichment and wellness of the customers.
- i) Three Distinct Characteristics: The three characteristics of these life style hotels are creativity, innovation and social connections. The creativity has helped these hotels to provide customer satisfaction for the ever evolving traveller (Penner, Adams & Rutes, 2013). The life style hotels have besieged by the increment in demands of stimulating, personalized and designed services and products. Therefore, they seek to prominently deviate from the various traditional concepts after creation of trendy and exclusive entourage. Moreover, these hotels also aim in creating the industry changeable market place for every higher end travel market (Dedeo?lu & Demirer, 2015). The external factors like race, wealth and backgrounds are not any more encouraged to be dominant in nature. For the cost effectiveness of these hotels, it becomes quite easy for the customers to afford these hotels without any type of issue. They focus on originality, open mindedness and non conformity for their customers and hence the customer experience and satisfaction is enhanced (Kosová, Lafontaine & Perrigot, 2013). Apart from providing luxury to the customers, the life style hotels also focus on the understanding of the several unique characteristics driving the newer non conforming travellers’ generation.
- ii) New Features: The cornerstone of the entire industry of hospitality is completely on the basis of responses as well as anticipation of customers’ experiences. Previously the focus was completely on the in room facilities and the creation of home like living spaces for the guests for spending their time in comfort of rooms (Karatepe & Karadas, 2015). However, with the rise of Airbnb and Millennial Generation, the entire industry of life style hotels is strongly witnessing some of the newer behavioural tendencies in reflection to the inclination of travellers for exploring their premised beyond the bedrooms and hence shifting their emphasis to the various public areas. The customers principally search for the warmer as well as inviting place in contrast to the elements of originality and urbanity, in which they could extensively spend their time (Narteh et al., 2013). The life style hotels even ensures that as soon as the guests have arrived, they should be greeted with the sensory environments. These sensory environments comprise of amplified amusements and a luxury life style as a whole. A popular lifestyle hotel, namely SLS Hotel in South Beach has eventually replaced their older concept of the traditional lobby with one of the open kitchens, where live culinary theatre is being played and the clientele are encouraged to get indulged in the exceptional place (Wu & Ko, 2013). Thus, the industry pioneer has incorporated the factor of life style by the creation of original as well as refined experience of customers.
iii) Key Targets Gen Y: During the last two decades or twenty years, there had been some of the major behavioural trends that have been reflected to increase the trendy facilities of beverages in the lifestyle sector (Nieves, Quintana & Osorio, 2014). The developers of life style hotel are progressively starting to perceive their indispensability to provide the appealing outlets of beverages for the effectiveness and efficiency of all such hotels. For maintaining a major balance, the life style hotels have targeted the key markets of generation Y or youth and Millennial.
The main reason for this type of target is that these hotels majorly search for the human interactions, elite entertainments as well as meaningful experiences. This generation youth and millennial are mostly attracted to these hotels for the lounges or bars. The life style hotels offer a wider selection of various social space and also upgrade the standardized configuration of the respective lounge or bar (Benavides-Velasco, Quintana-García & Marchante-Lara, 2014). Hence, the generation Y or youth and Millennial are encouraged for the purpose of consuming or connecting within the variety of outlets, each one of which offers a unique atmosphere as well as a distinct vibe. The respective requisite for abandoning the beverage outlets and thus bringing fancy diversification or selection.
- iv) Inclusion of Exclusive Membership Programs: Another important and significant feature of the life style hotels for enhancing customer experiences for the ever evolving traveller is including various exclusive membership programs within the business (Jani & Han, 2014). The loyal programs or the frequent guest programs have eventually started from the foundation of the Priority Club rewards program of the Inter Continental Hotels Group. The core purpose behind such loyalty programs was providing their guests with incentives for returning to the specific brand and company via main advantages like late check outs, point redemptions, room up gradations and executive level accessing (Hon, Chan & Lu, 2013). Some of the life style hotels also offer selected membership cards for the individuals, who are working for creativity, media and film industries. The advantages even involve private accessing to the restricted areas of hotel and provisionally to the sister club of the property. A community of individuals having similar goals, experiences and interests are also bound for the reinforcement of loyalty through any of the effective experience and hence the customer experience is positive for these hotels (Li, Ye & Law, 2013).
- v) The Event Calendar: The generation Y or youth and Millennial could be primarily characterized by the connection, up beating and their respective self expressive nature. The life style hotels could easily track them by advertising (Leung, Bai & Stahura, 2015). The Internet connection help these hotels to provide the most significant means of hotel marketing. The online event calendar has hence proven to be the most effective and efficient tool or technique for enhancing the brand awareness or attracting the new generation. The events play the most important role to promote the life style hotels within the local area. They light up the ambience and then encourage their guests in indulging within activities. Furthermore, the travellers are frequently drawn to these hotels, even before the selection of hotels is difficult (Fraj, Matute & Melero, 2015). With the stronger online presence by the search engines as well as social media, the travellers get the idea that how well the life style hotels are rejuvenating their images.
- vi) Luxury with Major Twist: The conventional luxury is the traditional concept for hotels (Leung, Bai & Stahura, 2015). In the earlier days, the hotels often faced some of the major challenges for outperforming within the markets for the various changes in behavioural patterns of guests as well as the facilities needed by the hotels. However, for the life style hotels, a uniqueness is being requested for the product offerings. The generation Y or youth and Millennial have thirst for knowledge and wants changes in every product. By the creation of design driven or pulsating culture, the life style hotels are inducing the air of innovation or creativity and are adhering to the expectations of the customers (Benavides-Velasco, Quintana-García & Marchante-Lara, 2014).
Meeting the Unique Needs of Digital, Social and Mobile Customers
vii) Advantages of Outsourcing: The growing trend or culture of outsourcing could be majorly observed amongst the globalized life style hotels (Zervas, Proserpio & Byers, 2017). The young hoteliers have been realizing that the operation for food as well as beverage outlets need a completely separate set of competency than that required for the management of room reservation, events, conferences or any other hotel service. The various operations of the life style hotels then entail specified attention, proficiency and time that could be substantially brought to the management of hotels by experienced or expertise chains (N. Torres & Kline, 2013).
The significant selection of the recognized brand could also encourage the customers in staying in these life style hotels than in the local hotels. This would be quite helpful for the customer experience in respect to the ever evolving traveller. With the help of outsourcing, the life style hotels eventually combine their brand positioning as well as culinary skills of the known chain of restaurants and hence enabling them in increasing their profitability in the most cost effective manner (Becerra, Santaló & Silva, 2013). This particular feature thus has allowed the management of the life style hotels in shifting the emphasis to their rooms as well as other areas for the generation of subsequent profit.
The above mentioned seven points has clearly focused on the fact that life style hotels has the core ability of delivering distinct, proper and positive customer experience with the ever evolving traveller (Nieves & Segarra-Ciprés, 2015). The main feature of these types of hotels majorly includes the focus on the core experience and not only on the service or product. The second significant feature of these hotels is the proper connection of the individuals or customers and hence building major relationships.
Moreover, innovative facilities are to be offered and newer forms of entertainment are also provided to the customer for providing a better experience to the travellers (Molina-Azorín et al., 2015). The online presence is being enhanced and some of the most aggressive strategies of marketing are implemented in these types of life style hotels. Finally, another important factor that enhances the customer in exceeding the experience as well as satisfaction is the emphasizing of creativity, innovation, rejuvenation and life enrichment (Wu & Ko, 2013). Hence, it could be concluded that the lifestyle hotels can distinctly deliver positive customer experience with the ever evolving travellers.
Advantages of Mobile Applications for Lifestyle Hotels
References
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