Prying is the new pampering. The payoff, hospitality executives say, is the ability to tailor service to a guest without the guest’s initiating any requests herself. Under the old model, a guest would have to volunteer that she loves tennis and might enjoy a lesson. Now, ideally, she need no longer say a thing; the staff has already sussed her out and booked a nine o’clock with the pro. As for that quaint “pre-arrival questionnaire” they used to send to incoming guests? Nearly obsolete, except at the most traditional properties. Who has the time to fill one out? Besides, for many of us, our identities, preferences, and proclivities are already posted online, and ripe for the culling.
For hotel companies, social media has essentially become a sanctioned form of eavesdropping. “Hotels have trained their staff to be intense listeners and mine information about their guests. This gives them a whole new realm in which to listen,” says Niki Leondakis, CEO of Commune Hotels & Resorts (formerly the president and COO of Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants). And listen they do. At One&Only Resorts, reservation teams look up incoming guests on Twitter, work-related sites, and blogs, then draw up detailed profiles (photos included) to distribute to top-level managers. The St. Regis Bora Bora Resort, meanwhile, Googles every guest two weeks prior to arrival. “We actually create a little story about them—just a paragraph or so—and share that with the heads of each department at our daily NDA [next-day arrivals] meeting,” says general manager Michael Schoonewagen. (You didn’t know they had a little story about you, did you?) It’s not rocket science, Schoonewagen adds, and it doesn’t cost them a thing. “The first page of Google results is usually sufficient. We’re not digging into every last detail of someone’s life—we just want a picture of who they are.”
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