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FreeGuides recognises that hotels and hostels are constantly looking for new ways to level up your guest's experience. You want to provide your guests with the best local tour guides, recommendations, route information and trip ideas. FreeGuides is a great digital tool that you can use to ensure your hotel/hostel guests have a stay to remember. Through FreeGuides, hotels/hostels can curate digital walking tours to allow guests to explore the local area in an easy, aesthetic and hassle-free manner on their phones. By doing so, a multitude of benefits and opportunities can arise for your business, some of which we will discuss in this blog post.
Here are 6 ways that hotels/hostels can use and benefit from FreeGuides:
Become an opinion leader in the local advice space
Maintain a continued relationship with guests after checkout
Virtual concierge
Clickable links for customers to book hotel/stay
Additional revenue stream
Build a strong relationship with partners nearby
1) BECOME A LOCAL OPINION LEADER
By creating a FreeGuides tour experience, you as a hotel/hostel are effectively showcasing your opinion of the local area. The inclusion of particular restaurants, places and activities in your tour shows that you approve of these locations and think they are worth people's time. When local FreeGuides users interact with the experiences you have created, they are also exposed to your opinions. Subsequently, they grow their own opinions of your hotel/hostel as a brand. If users like what they see, and feel like they align with your experiences, they are more likely to book accommodation with you. Hence, by becoming a local opinion leader through your FreeGuides presence, you will drive traffic towards your hotel/hostel.
2) CONTINUED RELATIONSHIP WITH GUESTS BEYOND CHECKOUT
Traditionally, once guests check out and leave the premises of your hotel/hostel, your consumer relationship comes to an end. However, this no longer has to be the case if you decide to create tour experiences with FreeGuides. When your hotel/hostel creates a FreeGuides experience, you allow guests to have a continued relationship with your business as they are able to continue following your experiences even after they checkout. When they follow one of your FreeGuide experiences, they will be reminded of their stay at your accommodation and can even communicate with you through the platform!
3) VIRTUAL CONCIERGE
Gone are the days of having to employ and train new hotel/hostel concierges. Instead, you can direct your customers straight to the FreeGuides app, where guests will be equipped with a range of concierge-related resources digitally! Through FreeGuides, guests can find and follow various walking tours, see local restaurants, and find recommendations for things to do in the area. These tours may be created by your hostel/hotel or other local guides. Basically, we remove the hassle of having to coordinate all your guest's travel plans... SCORE!
4) CLICKABLE LINKS FOR CUSTOMERS TO BOOK A STAY
When you create experiences on FreeGuides, we give you the option to include URLs at each tour stop. This feature opens an exciting opportunity for hotels/hostels who are creating FreeGuides experiences as you can insert a link to your accommodation booking site within the tour you create. For example, if one of the stops you include in your tour is getting a drink at your hotel's bar, you could insert a clickable link to your booking website in the stop description section. This creates new opportunities for customers to book a stay at your hotel/hostel.
5) ADDITIONAL REVENUE STREAM
Creating experiences with FreeGuides is also a great additional revenue stream for your hotel/hostel. The current FreeGuides ‘pay-what-you-want’ model allows explorers taking your tours to tip you however much they like at the end of the journey. Our cashless system is beneficial as it allows for regular and consistent payments even through unexpected conditions such as weather and unforeseen pressures, and data shows that explorers tip higher amounts when offered cashless systems only. So, if you make multiple high-quality experiences, you increase the chance of raking in some extra revenue for your hotel/hostel when users go on your tours!
6) BUILD STRONG RELATIONSHIP WITH NEARBY PARTNERS
Within your FreeGuides experience, you can add stops to nearby businesses such as local cafes and boutiques. Doing so provides extra foot traffic to those businesses as you guide your explorers there. This feature can be leveraged to benefit your hotel/hostel by forming a partnership/strong relationship with these businesses. Together you can arrange mutually beneficial deals; for example in exchange for the foot traffic you provide a cafe, they could provide your explorers with a discounted coffee. This deal is the definition of win/win with explorers tipping you for access to a cheaper coffee that tastes better than most, and the local cafe owner getting a new customer to spread the word. FreeGuides lets you boost two incomes at once, and maybe even a little extra more for yourself once the owners see how many more customers are walking into their stores. These strong relationships you have now built may even come in handy within other aspects of your hotel/hostel model.
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