RE-OPENING

TOOLKIT
A GUIDE FOR HOTELIERS
In this guide, we’ll cover the most popular and trending topics hotels should consider while getting ready
for guests again. From marketing and loyalty to revenue management and group sales, get advice on
everything you need to know to resume operations after the global pandemic COVID-19.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Communications

Loyalty

Data warehouse

Business intelligence

Budgeting & forecasting

Contactless sales
COMMUNICATIONS

Communicating with your database

First of all, it’s important to recognize that the priorities of travelers have changed dramatically. Mundane concerns like checking in
early and getting a room with a view have been replaced by concerns about travel restrictions and safety. By now we’ve all seen 
examples of tone-deaf ads. Now is not the time for the hard sell. Right now, everyone’s priority must be to stop the spread of the virus.
Only then will travel resume. In an ironic twist, some destinations are encouraging people not to travel. 

In the short-term, hotels need to focus on keeping travelers informed and assisting with reservations and changes. A dedicated page
on your website is a good way to answer travelers’ questions all in one place. Direct inquiries there, and include a link to the page 
in reservation confirmations. Be sure to update the information regularly. Pay attention to visual messaging too. Photos of groups 
mingling in the bar and attending events might not be the best message to send out now. Consider replacing them with photos of 
individuals, couples, families or even staff at work cleaning and sanitizing.When travel restrictions are lifted, shift your messaging to
encouraging people to travel. Later, as travel gains momentum, you can be more aggressive with promotions.

Segmentation
As plans for re-opening begin, it’s important to strategize about
what segments will be the first to be able to travel. Will it be for 
leisure, business, or both? Will it be hyper-local, or do you anticipate
travelers from further afield? 

L everage micro segments as well based on lifestyle demographics

and psychographics, as each group’s desire to travel will resonate
based on targeted messaging. Either way, map this out in a staged
approach with your defined audiences under each phase.

This will allow you to determine whom you should communicate

with, in each phase. This planning will directly impact your revenue
forecasting as well, so stay aligned with your revenue team to
ensure a collaborative approach.
Email marketing
Once your segmentation plan is complete, you are ready to start marketing to your different lists.
People need confidence before they travel again, so share what you can with them about 
changes you’ve made to ensure their safety. Safety will be a huge deciding factor for those 
thinking about booking, so keep your communication efforts on this top of mind. If you are 
re-targeting those who have recently canceled their bookings – email marketing is a great way 
to inspire them to re-book. As before, think about the different scenarios and the right approach
for each segment.

Pre-arrival emails
Success! Bookings have slowly started to come in again. This is great news, but how do you 
continue to instill confidence about their stay? Things will most likely be quite different when they
get there, so now is the time to let them know. Pre-arrival emails can be the best way to excite
guests about their upcoming trip. It’s a great channel to communicate about dining options, 
activities, local tips etc., but they can also be used to communicate important changes. 
The more transparent you can be about these changes, the better the overall experience
will be for each guest. To ensure you are maintaining the right level of personalization, use 
segmentation and dynamic content to tailor your messages for specific guests.

Pre-arrival survey
Understanding your guests’ needs before they arrive has never been 
so important. By using tools like pre-arrival surveys, you can gather
intel on your guests that you may not have otherwise been able to do.

Automate surveys to be sent out prior to arrival to gather information 

on their needs and preferences for their stay.
Post-stay survey
Now is the time to look into the automation deployment of online surveys after a guest leaves. As
the check-out experience becomes increasingly contactless, this will be your chance to hear directly
from your guests on what they loved, liked and felt could be better. It’s ensuring you have a feedback
mechanism built in that shows you’re listening. You’ll likely get some really valuable feedback,
especially on the new modified guest experience you’ve deployed. Hopefully, you’ll also get
some rave reviews out of it as well on TripAdvisor and Google!

Digital marketing
There’s no point in wasting scarce resources on targeting people who cannot or will not travel.
Data from Google Trends, Keyword Planner, Adara and Sojern can help you find people who 
intend to travel over specific dates from your key feeder markets.

Rather than spend on brand and upper-funnel marketing in the early days, focus on lower-funnel
performance marketing – generating clicks and bookings through search marketing, SEO,
retargeting, OTAs, metasearch and TripAdvisor.

To avoid coming across as trying to monetize the coronavirus term, update your negative keyword
and block lists. Adjust ad messaging and remove countries under travel bans. You can reinstate
them after restrictions are lifted.

HOTEL CRM
To help you achieve the right communication strategy, a robust hotel CRM platform will provide you
with the tools needed to segment, personalize and communicate with every guest at every digital
touchpoint throughout the travel journey. Learn more about eInsight CRM and Guestfolio CRM at
Cendyn.com.
LOYALTY
Knowing who your loyal guests are – if people are travelling, they are going to places they know and trust

Your die-hards
It’s a safe bet that some of the first people at your door when travel picks up will be your loyal guests. Use your CRM to identify 
frequent guests, those most likely to travel and anyone who canceled recently, and send them personalized offers to return.

Points
If you have a loyalty program, reduce the number of points needed to redeem a free stay and offer point bonuses for stays in
the coming months. Send emails to members who haven’t stayed in a while with an enticing offer to return. And reach out to
members whose points or rewards are expiring soon and extend the deadline to build goodwill.

Loyalty campaigns
Your direct outreach during hibernation mode should pay dividends here. As you reopen, reach back out to
those very same contacts and give them a clear plan of action for what they can expect in the weeks 
and months ahead. Next, refresh your menu of promotions to provide fodder for your loyalty 
member outreach. Then, dive into your loyalty CRM and build “we’re open for business” campaigns,
personalized to each segment.

We also suggest building two campaigns, an initial outreach campaign that tests the waters 
and gauges interest. If the initial campaign is less successful than expected, then launch another 
campaign with more aggressive offers and lucrative packages. As you build out these packages, 
keep in mind that they should fit within your total revenue management strategy. Even with the 
downturn, you want to maximize overall revenue; so carefully consider which packages correlate 
with which segments.

eLoyalty
Reward guests with a personalized, distinctive loyalty experience that
encourages them to keep coming back. Learn more about our CRM
and Loyalty platform at Cendyn.com.
A DATA WAREHOUSE
A data warehouse allows you to consolidate data from multiple siloed platforms into a central source of truth. Once you have that data in a
central data warehouse, you are able to leverage it to tailor communications based on the data available from all platforms.

As we’ve seen guests will ignore messages that appear irrelevant and tone-deaf, or untargeted to their current needs. Especially during the
COVID-19 pandemic, guests needs are based on numerous factors including location, family situation, health conditions and more. Not one size
fits all. It’s therefore important for hoteliers to recognize the benefits of using a data warehouse - like CRM - to consolidate and action their data.

Guest profiles
Guest profiles are the cornerstone of CRM. The wealth of data that is stored and actionable within a guest profile enables hoteliers
to improve the guest experience from the moment they make a booking. From segments to interests and preferences, having this
data in one central place allows you to leverage what you need for marketing, revenue, and operations purposes. Use your guest
profiles to build out your plan for re-opening. As well as market data, target those who are more likely to travel based on location
and previous spend.

Reducing contact
CRM can also lend a big helping hand in reducing contact. Guests and staff can log preferences in advance of a trip and
during it, so room preferences, allergies, and amenity requests are handled automatically without requiring physical 
interaction. A CRM helps hotels serve clients more remotely, with less contact throughout the guest journey.

The importance of data

We expect data management to become more important in the day-to-day operations, especially
for on-property guest activities and preferences, hotel restaurants and facilities popular with events
and conferences. If we have data online that’s easily accessible by staff and entered by guests, we
don’t have to have people entering info on keypads or giving that information to a worker on site in
close contact.

Hotel CRM
To help you achieve the right communication strategy, a robust hotel CRM platform will provide you
with the tools needed to segment, personalize and communicate with every guest at every digital
touchpoint throughout the travel journey. Learn more about our CRM and Loyalty platform at
Cendyn.com.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
Understanding your data and knowing what the future looks like

While you ramp up, it’s imperative that you can track your hotel’s progress and successes. This insight gives the whole team the big 
picture trends that can cascade and recede on a daily basis, arming them with the insights they need to make revenue, staffing, 
opening and other decisions. Robust business intelligence allows you to prepare, strategize, build, and restructure for a strong recovery.
After years of growth in the hotel industry, it’s disheartening to compare this year’s numbers to previous years. But tracking KPIs and
benchmarking performance is as important as ever - and just think about how good your numbers will look next year! 

Set short-term and long-term objectives and develop a timeline and roadmap for achieving them. Benchmark performance against 
competitors as well as similar hotels in your region and other regions – measure market share, customer engagement, guest satisfaction
and online reputation. Identify hotels and regions that show early signs of recovery and use them as a model to guide your own path
to recovery.

Let data guide your decisions

Finding travelers in the early days of reopening will require paying close attention 
to data and using it to guide decisions on pricing, inventory and restrictions.
Fortunately, this comes naturally to seasoned revenue managers.

External data may include market share reports, market trends and competitor data, 
as well as rate-shopping and reputation data. Updates like STR’s weekly performance 
reports and webinars will help you monitor travel patterns and fluctuations in demand.

REVINTEL
Go beyond the ‘what’ to understand the ‘why’ to make faster,
better-informed, revenue decisions. With revintel, use 55
out-of-the-box reports so you can spend more time on 
analysis and strategy instead of acquiring data. Learn more
about revintel at Cendyn.com.
BUDGETING AND FORECASTING

Offers
When demand falls so precipitously, the natural reaction is to slash rates in order to capture as much occupancy as possible. But
experience shows us that lower rates do little to stimulate demand, especially if people are concerned about safety. Also keep in
mind that price wars can have a devastating impact on ADR. 

When it comes to driving demand in such an uncertain time, look at providing offers that reduce impact to your bottom line - for
example - provide vouchers for on-property restaurants, one-night extra free, etc. Get creative with your marketing team to share
offers that will entice the type of guests you are targeting.

Focus on total revenue and total profitability

In recent years, many hotels have shifted from rooms-centric revenue management to total revenue management. While the long game
should stay the same, not until F&B, meetings and other revenue streams resume operation can hotels fully realize the benefits.
“Rather than focus on rate, focus on profitability,” recommends Michael Bennett, Cendyn’s CMO. “Understand the costs behind your rates
and value-adds to ensure you’re not giving away potential profit. Explain your strategy to ownership and your management company 
to get more leeway instead of being expected to massively cut rates.”

Master the art and science of forecasting

Forecast much lately? Rest assured that you’re performing a critical function that helps department heads, owners and management companies
anticipate future revenue and manage planning and costs. As challenging as it may be right now, it’s important to be as accurate and realistic as
possible. Your hotel’s performance will be largely dictated by outside forces in the coming months. According to McKinsey, tourism 
and hospitality will take longer to recover than other sectors, in part because it depends on these sectors for business.
Pay close attention to market changes and reforecast regularly, utilizing available forecasting tools, data and 
resources to anticipate where and when travel will pick up again and ensure you’re on the upswing of recovery.

 herever your property may be in the lifecycle of the pandemic, every bit of revenue counts. 
W
As always, prioritize direct bookings and the most profitable channels, and implement upsell and 
cross-sell initiatives as appropriate. Coordinate with marketing, sales and operations to ensure 
alignment in optimizing total revenue and profitability.

RAINMAKER
Optimize revenue, drive profitability, save valuable time, and outperform your competitors. 
Our revenue management system is built to optimize profit for every segment of your transient and
group business. Learn more about Rainmaker at Cendyn.com.
 CONTACTLESS SALES
Getting sales back on track

Digitize groups and events

To reduce contact for groups and events at your hotel, hotels will need to shift to digital management of many elements and increasing their tech stacks. When 
it comes to events for example, offer digital registration that’s completely contactless. For group sales, offer video chats between your sales team and prospective
clients alongside virtual tours to avoid an on-site inspection visit at the property. Hotels will also need to show their live stream capabilities, WIFI strength and video
conferencing abilities in their proposals, as well as their modifications for social distancing in meeting spaces, as this will become increasingly important.

Technology infrastructure
Now is the time to go all in for investment in fast WIFI, strong networks and other tech tools that will be required for groups and events that have smaller crowds with
others joining virtually. In addition to infrastructure, focus on usability as well. Think accessibility for all: both free and ease of use. Make sure accessing the technology
is easy for anyone. Picture your Gran trying to access and adapt WIFI and other virtual connectivity tools so she would be able to do it!

Handling capacity
In your proposals and Web sites for groups and events, communicate how you are handling things like:

Social distancing restrictions that Alignment with restrictions on other

mandate a hotel must leave a
certain number of rooms empty;
this may even be based on the
physical location of the rooms,
e.g. occupying every other room
on a floor rather than closing
entire floors
on-property offerings – for instance, if
restaurants or a casino floor are only be
permitted to be half-full, a hotel may not
want to create a situation in which it can’t
accommodate hotel guests, or else 
detract from the guest experience

Staffing levels for housekeepers Hotels that are instituting the

that might result in closing a 
certain number of floors
completely; likely an economic
decision based on when marginal
revenues no longer cover the c  ost
of turning a room
safety requirement of waiting
24-72 hours (typically) until
a housekeeper may enter a
room to clean it

EPROPOSAL
Take your hotel sales strategy online with eProposal. Seize first responder advantage
as you deliver personalized, media-rich RFP replies in minutes. Provide that personal
touch for when you can’t be there in person, and showcase your property and
offering with the most widely used proposal tool in hospitality. Find out more about
our Sales Cloud products at Cendyn.com.
 EQUIP YOUR HOTEL WITH THE TOOLS YOU NEED FOR REOPENING
Cendyn can get you on the other side with confidence. See how our solutions can help:

MARKETING CLOUD

• Use automation to keep your guests informed of any COVID-19 changes


• Use segmentation to personalize every communication
• Go contactless and take requests online
• Survey your guests and hear from them every step of the way

REVENUE CLOUD

• Price and forecast for guests and groups with precision

• Visualize business trends and optimize revenue
• 55 out-of-the-box reports
• Gain back valuable time in your day

SALES CLOUD

• Empower contactless sales to reduce site visits

• Easily update proposal templates to convey social distancing modifications
• Help your sales teams capture events you can still service during COVID-19
• Showcase live stream capabilities, WIFI strength and video conferencing abilities

For over 20 years, our technology and strong relationships have helped hotels weather
crises so that they come out of downturns stronger than ever. We’re in this together.
To find out more about how we can help your hotel, contact us today.

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