Transforming Guest Loyalty in Hospitality with Passpoint

Driving guest loyalty has always been a complex playground for hospitality brands. By creating personalized services, using technology to engage and interact, implementing a tiered-based approach or ensuring safety, etc., brands continue to foray into such measures and try to use them in different ways to turn guests into loyal returning customers.

As studies have shown, customer retention has a significant impact on profits as compared to acquiring new customers, which states that Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. That is why brands have long competed to speed up loyalty enrolments by ensuring the best stay experience.

But what indicates guest loyalty?

For hotels, it is when customers provide repeat business to them, either through rebooking at a specific brand location or choosing to stay at other chain locations of the same or partner brand.

Simply put, a loyal guest will continue to choose one hotel location or its chain over other available options. This often occurs irrespective of higher prices since customers will not hesitate to spend a bit more on assurance of the highest quality of stay.

A returning guest will go to the extent of being a social media promoter on various digital channels, creating more potential loyal guests for the future.

Hospitality technology solutions have played an influential role in enhancing guest satisfaction and, subsequently, guest loyalty, which automatically drives revenue opportunities. Placing investments in experience and management technologies proves to be an effective way to provide an exceptional experience during and after a guest arrives at a brand’s destination.

Can Wi-Fi be a Guest Loyalty Enabler?

While services and amenities play an important role in strengthening a brand’s loyalty program, Wi-Fi continues to be on top of the guest list of requirements, where it is often noticed that the first thing most of them do upon arrival is to look for a Wi-Fi connection. As the need of modern guests to always stay connected increases, it points toward a great platform that can be built on top of Wi-Fi and leveraged by brands to enhance their loyalty programs.

A great Wi-Fi experience for your guests generates an opportunity to add millions to the top line, steers brand loyalty, and reduces your loyalty acquisition cost.

Ensuring guests have an ‘always-on’ Wi-Fi service will become a key to enabling a superior quality guest experience. However, continuing the traditional method of asking the guests to enter their email address or phone number every time they intend to use the Wi-Fi on every visit introduces unwarranted barriers that can damage the guest experience.

More often, a hotel’s Wi-Fi security might lack basic features, favoring convenience for guests over providing secure Wi-Fi access. It puts guests, especially business customers, at risk since it allows malicious actors to compromise the guest’s device and then access the business network of the guest’s employer. Attackers may target hotels to get records of guest names, personal information, and even credit card numbers.

Driving Guest Loyalty & Security with Passpoint

Passpoint upgrades the existing Wi-Fi infrastructure and services deployed at hotels. It enables guests, along with the staff, to connect with minimum friction and with added security via encryption. It removes the friction and frustration of asking your guests to log in each time and takes them closer to a seamless Wi-Fi journey that increases satisfaction and drives loyalty.

With Passpoint, hotels can unlock seamless, secure connectivity on the network and automatically connect their guests at every brand property without asking them to re-enter credentials for authentication every time they visit any of the properties.

Additionally, through roaming agreements in place, devices can auto-connect to other places during a guest journey, like meeting rooms, coffee shops, restaurants, and more.

This opens up avenues for hoteliers and the associated businesses to build services around the connected guests. It also brings a solution to the long-standing battle for hotels of not having a standard for secure Wi-Fi access by introducing enterprise-grade security (a.k.a WPA2/WPA3) to the network.

Next Generation Hotspot Powered by Passpoint

HSC’s Next Generation Hotspot (NGH) has leveraged Passpoint to transform the way guests experience the Wi-Fi service during their stay. Hotels have leveraged the NGH solution so that guests enjoy a consistent branded Wi-Fi experience, regardless of the service provider or the underlying network infrastructure.

Similar to the principles of a cellular journey, NGH securely authenticates a guest with a certificate on their mobile phone, which the guests download during their first visit, and enables an experience of how a device is recognized as it moves from one location to another. It keeps the guests connected to the Wi-Fi, no matter which brand’s location they visit.

For the hotels, it allows them to identify the guests’ devices and locations and build their digital guest journey around this information. By allowing guests to connect to Wi-Fi with a single guest profile, brands can deliver digital and real-time services based on actual data. NGH eliminates the reliance on MAC addresses for guest recognition and authentication, thus, providing a future-proof solution for the upcoming MAC randomization threats.

Moreover, businesses always look to achieve additional revenues through loyalty programs. Apart from establishing a new connectivity experience that focuses on the massive adoption of a hotel’s loyalty program, NGH differentiates itself by empowering them to push location-based advertisements to guests, creating a new engagement channel that extends the reach of its advertising without having to install any application on guests’ devices.

NGH also includes rich presence and location analytics, which give brands full control to trigger location or event-specific guest interactions like rewards or special offers.

Conclusion

As one of the pioneers in providing Wi-Fi-based solutions to hospitality and other enterprises, HSC believes Hospitality brands need to have a strategic approach to deliver the best Wi-Fi experience to guests and make it part of the journey towards driving loyalty. Wi-Fi is a business asset rather than a mere IT consideration. Introducing Passpoint into your existing Wi-Fi service can result in the creation of a cost-effective and incredibly successful loyalty acquisition channel that drives additional revenue.