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Systems supporting guest loyalty
By Paul Manley
3/14/2007
URL: http://www.hospitalityupgrade.com/_magazine/magazine_Detail.asp?ID=95

Summary
Guest loyalty program in hospitality industry started from mid 1970s for guest recognition, direct mail, pre populating name and the address information for direct reservation. During the 1990s, as technology evolved, large hotel companies were giving points to the customers each time when the guest stayed in the property (similar to the airline point programs). Beside the point system, benefit program providing services such as upgrade room, concierge level service and guaranteed reservations were also added into guest loyalty program lately. Point system, benefit system or combination of both, are a component of customer relationship management strategy where the goal is to maximize a customer’s lifetime value. The technology components that support the guest loyalty program which is mentioned above can be grouped into database, application and integration technologies.
Database
Core of the database system; there is a loyalty base system which keeps data associated with member address, tier status, points of transactions, partners and data associated with business rules. There is a transaction database that records the period of stay, the member number and etc. Data marts are produced to serve specific group (marketing department) to effectively analyze the data.
Applications
Applications support the business requirements for guest loyalty program and it can be divided into three groups. Firstly, enrollment of new members and maintenance of demographics is covered by the member profile management. Secondly, accounting tracks all earnings and reimbursement. And lastly, member services covers the call center and web applications for member profile management.
Integration
Depending on the context that is used, integration can be either technically oriented or user oriented. It is called technical orientation when one system (core loyalty program) passes data to another system (various systems such as corporate database). User orientation associates more with the business process engineering (example; reports dissatisfaction to prevent in the near future time).


Reflection
I really enjoyed reading this article because it had showed me the brief idea of how guest loyalty program is used, organized and works in reality. However, the article itself used too many jargons; hence, it was difficult to understand the whole article from my perspective. Guest loyalty programs are used as strategy for customer relationship management in hospitality industry. And to provide better service and product that will exceed customer’s expectations, there have to be a supporting system that will provide every bits of information that the property needs to serve and satisfy the guest. Understanding the support system and how it is structured can be useful for the future hotel managers to facilitate the system. For example, when a guest opt out a specific function such as marketing communications hotel managers may offer a product or service package with an email or direct mail by using data marts. Data marts (one part of database) that are created to serve specific department can develop an analyst on trends, preferences or profiles in detail. Also, to acquire new members it supports several marketing campaigns such as seasonal promotions, emails and/or direct mails.
By, personalizing the marketing campaigns in detail, it would increase revenue to the property and also guest satisfaction.