Our top 5 methods for hospitality customer recruitment
While 2025 was a stable year for the hotel industry, that doesn’t mean there weren’t challenges.
Room occupancy rates remained at 79%, meaning that roughly 1 in 5 rooms is unoccupied at any given time.
Hotel owners and managers will know that figure represents untapped potential.
While aiming for 100% occupancy is unrealistic—imagine trying to carry out repairs and maintenance—business will obviously profit if they can fill more rooms while keeping standards high.
So how can your hotel attract more guests? We look at 5 tips to get more feet through the doors and heads on the pillows.
Ensure your website is user friendly
Our first tip ties into the first point of contact most potential guests will have with your hotel. The percentage of travellers starting their accommodation search online continues to grow rapidly.
But not all of them are happy. In fact, over half of them quit halfway through a booking because of poor customer experience. If you’re a part of that statistic, you’re throwing money down the drain!
To avoid that happening, you’ll want to make sure that your website is easy to navigate, responds quickly to users searching on a range of devices, and makes it easy to compare options, preferably in a way that shows them that you’re the best value.
A chatbot is another website addition that can help potential guests even when your staff aren’t available, providing 24/7 answers to any questions they may have. Just be sure to properly configure any AI assistants to clearly define what they do and don’t have the authority to do.
We’re starting to see stories of carelessly configured bots who have offered mammoth discounts to lure guests in, losing the hotel money if they accept the booking or suffering reputational damage if they don’t.
Reach out to past guests
Previous guests can make perfect future guests! After all, there was a reason they stayed with your hotel before, and hopefully they had a positive experience while they were there. If you can capture additional data about them, you may even be able to create targeted offers for them to return and relive the magic.
Learn your demographics
Data on previous guests also helps you build up a more complete picture of who stays at your hotel—your key demographics. Are there particular trends in the sort of people arriving at your door? See if you can identify commonalities and sort your guests into groups.
For instance, you may notice that most of your guests are either solo business travellers or families with young children. Great! Each will have their own interests and factors that feed into their decisions about where to stay. Cater to each one distinctly and you drive up your chances of attracting more of the same people that you know how to cater to.
Reward loyalty
If you are attracting past guests back for another stay, you can turn a second visit into a third, a fourth, and many more! A loyalty scheme gives them reasons to keep coming back time and time again.
Whether it’s collecting points and discounts or free upgrades after a certain number of stays, there are plenty of ways to reward repeat business and build yourself a sustainable flow of customers. You can even tie in other beneficial activities, like having positive reviews or recommendations count towards the benefits and bonuses they accrue.
Partner with nearby attractions and venues
Plenty of people stay in hotels when they’re in the area for other reasons: events, activities, business, and pleasure. Get to know your local area and what might attract people there for a stay. Then reach out to those attractions and see if you can work together for the benefit of both.
Is there a conference centre that regularly holds large conventions of travellers needing somewhere to stay? Or a local theme park that attracts families for multi-day visits? Promote them with discounted rates and information within your own hotel, and get them to recommend you as a ‘preferred partner hotel’ for anyone visiting there.
Creating gifts and giveaways that showcase more of your surrounding area and its businesses can also work wonders. Why not partner with a local spa to offer discounted retreats for lucky winners? There are plenty of ways to bring people in with what you offer and the connections you can make.