Boutique Hotel Kung Fu: Digital Personalization
Hotel Versey in Chicago, like dozens of other boutique hotels, is striving to differentiate itself from the hundreds of other hotels in town. Boutique hotels have become big business in the hotel industry. Guests are looking for more curated and authentic experiences. How does a boutique hotel get found and beat the big names who have marketing budgets that are 100 times larger than theirs?
Find Your Unfair Advantage
Like every great David and Goliath story, boutique hotels can exploit an unfair advantage that their larger counterparts can’t match. For Hotel Versey, it was creating location-based content to connect people to its brand and its neighborhood.
A boutique hotel’s best asset is how it relates the story of its brand and hones its personality to deliver a unique guest experience. Hotel Versey used its location and the diversity of attractions, art, and theater to its advantage. Instead of front desk workers simply telling guests where to go when asked, they proactively created experiential content on VAMONDE that welcomed guests further into its story and the stories of its neighborhood.
View two of their experiences:
Hotel Versey — Art Walk — https://www.vamonde.com/adventure/hotel-versey-art-walk/1/401
Hotel Versey — Belmont Theater District — https://www.vamonde.com/adventure/belmont-theater-district/1/404
Keep the End Goal in Mind
Having a great location isn’t enough. Hotel Versey knew that it had to build fantastic content to connect its guests to its location and brand. To accomplish this, they turned to VAMONDE to deliver on two critical business goals for them; increasing bookings and improving the visitor experience.
Increased bookings
Hotel Versey has dozens of unique art pieces that line its walls. It also sits in a neighborhood that prides itself on art and culture (and the Cubs). They use VAMONDE as an experiential guide to connect its neighborhood’s artsy demographic to the art inside the hotel and the many boutiques and public art outside the hotel. Hotel Versey provides value to its target demographic through meaningful content to drive new bookings. Existing guests also have a significant reason to return because Hotel Versey’s content provides them with more of the memories inspiring us to travel.
Improved visitor experience
Boutique hotels differentiate themselves by being able to provide a more personalized experience to guests. While this works exceedingly well inside the hotel, once guests venture outside the hotel, the guests are left to their own devices. Hotel Versey created content that connected local businesses and experiences that they know their guests will enjoy and they used VAMONDE to guide them there.
Technology is transforming the way travelers interact with hotels and are guests expecting far more personalized experiences. The front desk is no longer the front line in guest service. It’s on mobile. 90% of travelers use mobile for navigating, and 70% use mobile to plan what to do. Hotel Versey has begun its journey providing its guests the digital experience that boutique guests expect through immersive and location-powered content on VAMONDE.
Technology isn’t replacing interaction with humans in hospitality. Technology is taking much of the transactional burden and allowing hotel staff and guests to interact on a more meaningful basis. Moreover, success in the hospitality industry today means you excel at the personalized human interactions and the transactional interactions fade into the background.
After all, we travel for memories, and it is the shared moments of human interactions that provide us with the richly colored memories which are shared with friends and on social media.
About Hotel Versey:
Forget ordinary hotel stays, and go for a unique urban lifestyle experience. Located in Chicago’s vibrant Lincoln Park and Lakeview neighborhood, Hotel Versey connects travelers with the local culture, music, art, and food of the Windy City. A bold and eclectic new design and local art merge with our storied jazz and rock history to create a reimagined hotel. Hotel Versey’s opening and interior design were celebrated on Architectural Digest’s prestigious list of “The 12 Best Designed Hotels Opening This Year.” Edgy, quirky and dramatic, we are Chicago and invite you to stay like a local.
Learn more about Hotel Versey at https://www.hotelversey.com/.
VAMONDE is a digital content platform for cultural travel. Learn more at www.solutions.vamonde.com.
