Guest Journey

“Guest journey” is used two ways in hospitality, and the two are worth separating before either is useful. It describes the arc a guest travels, a way of thinking rather than a piece of software. It is also the product name several platforms use for automated sequences, including restaurant CRMs and guest data platforms. The first is a map. The second is a machine that runs on a small part of the map.

What are the stages of a guest journey?

A restaurant guest journey has five stages, and most operators can name them without help: discovery, booking, the visit, the follow-up, and the return. Discovery is a search result, a friend, a review or a walk past the window. Booking is the reservation or the decision to walk in. The visit is the service itself. The follow-up is anything that happens in the days after, including a review the guest writes without being asked. The return closes the loop and starts it again from a different position, because a second visit begins with expectations the first did not have.

The stage that gets designed least is the space between visits. A restaurant with strong service and no plan for the gap has a good visit rather than a journey. Everything a guest is likely to encounter between the last visit and the next one is a marketing email, a review request or nothing at all.

Which parts of the guest journey does a restaurant have data for?

A restaurant has usable data for roughly the middle of the journey and very little at either end. The coverage is uneven in a specific way.

• Discovery is nearly invisible. A restaurant sees the booking channel and sometimes a referral source. Why the guest chose the room is not recorded anywhere.
• Booking is well recorded. The reservation platform holds the name, contact detail, party size, time, notes and history.
• The visit is recorded in pieces. The check knows what was spent and often what was ordered. Whether the guest was recognized, what the server noticed, and what went wrong at table nine are recorded only if someone types them in.
• The follow-up is recorded where it is digital. Reviews, replies and messages are captured. A conversation at the door is not.

The uneven coverage is the reason the journey concept is harder in hospitality than in ecommerce. An online store observes every step; a restaurant observes the transaction and infers the rest. This is also why the guest notes a team writes by hand carry so much weight. They are the only record of the part of the journey no system captures.

What is the difference between a guest journey and an automated journey?

A guest journey is the whole arc, most of which no software touches. An automated journey is a configured sequence: a trigger, some conditions, and one or more actions. Conflating them leads operators to believe a set of email automations covers the guest experience, when a sequence can only act on events a system records.

A useful test is to ask what a step would do if it ran perfectly. An automated first-visit sequence can thank the right guest at the right time in the right tone. It cannot make the second visit feel different from the first. That difference is what a returning guest actually notices, and it is designed by people rather than configured.

What can an automated journey do at each stage?

An automated journey reads a trigger from one system and takes an action in another, and the set of possible actions is narrower than the set of possible triggers. Triggers come from reservations, checks, private events and hotel stays. Actions are messages, tags and notes.

Loyalist’s Journeys product works this way: triggers and conditions read from the reservation platform, the point of sale, events and hotel PMS data, then actions send email or SMS, apply a tag, or write a tag or note back into supported reservation platforms.

The asymmetry between reading and writing is the part that shapes what a journey can do on the floor. Point-of-sale data comes in and nothing goes back out to it, so a journey can fire on what a guest spent but cannot put anything on a POS screen. The reservation book is the exception, and it is the useful one, because the book is what a host reads at the door. A tag written back onto tonight’s reservation reaches the guest through a person rather than through an inbox. That step is where hospitality is actually delivered, and it is the one an inbox-only automation never gets to.