Using brand and tech to capitalise on post-pandemic staycation boom

“There's a lot of lost opportunity in the market; if hoteliers applied some fairly standard best practice features to their digital presence, they would be able to increase booking by at least 1-10%,” reveals Laurence Parkes, CEO at design and technology agency Rufus Leonard. According to research by Staycation provider, Hoseasons, 52% of Brits are planning on at least one staycation in 2022, and 24% are already planning their next UK trip. Bookings for this summer are also up 82% compared to the same period in 2019 for summer 2020 holidays, and bookings across 2022 are up 62%. “There has been an increase in demand for staycations, but also an increase in investment in staycations,” Parkes shares. Hoseasons also witnessed “significant growth” in the number of new holiday park and lodge resorts entering the market, with an 85% increase in the number of sites joining its portfolio in 2021 compared to pre-pandemic levels in 2019. As it looks increasingly likely that the staycation boom is here to stay for the foreseeable future, what opportunities are currently present in the travel industry? The key opportunity Parkes highlights is the importance of creating an “attractive offering” to guests through an “optimised” digital journey, something which he reveals a large amount of UK hotels lack. If a business’ website isn’t performing “as well as they should”, then they are not as visible through Google, which can ultimately have a detrimental effect on the overall success. A “simple” journey through the booking process is also vital for a hotel’s offering. “The fact that many booking engines might not be as simple as people would like means they will drop off during the booking experience, so there's a lot of lost opportunity” Parkes explains, hence why a hotel is “not going to capitalise on the increase in staycation bookings as much as the competition”. Hoseasons also reveals that 84% of those who undertook a staycation in 2021 planned to do so again in 2022, so what is the main driver for this continuing trend? Despite greater freedom to travel due to the easing of restrictions around the world following the Covid-19 pandemic, there is “a background level of concern” driving an interest in holidays “closer to home”. “The cost of living crisis we are experiencing also means that people are more likely to stay in the UK and have a holiday in a place that feels more familiar,” Parkes shares. With inflation increasing by 5.5% in the 12 months to January 2022, up from 5.4% in December 2021, the UK has witnessed the highest annual inflation rate since May 1992, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reveals. With Brits having to tighten their pockets, Parkes expects the staycation trend to continue as the public increasingly look to more local areas for a holiday. “However little discretionary money people have, they will always need a break”, he asserts. As Brits are taking fewer holidays throughout the year due to rising costs, it's “even more important that those breaks feel like value for money”. Ultimately, this means that there is growing pressure for staycation providers to “up the ante” in terms of attracting and maintaining the expectations of a British holiday. How can staycation providers take advantage of this and stand out in the competitive landscape with brand and technology? Parkes imparts: “Increasingly, technology is changing the way businesses are run, whether it's managing your resources or communicating internally, all of those things are now becoming part and parcel of what a modern business is utilising to profitably run the business.” He states that a core way of standing out is by connecting a business’ brand purpose with its tech stack to drive a “groundbreaking” digital experience. As businesses try to attract a wide audience, a “decent” digital presence is not enough. In order for hoteliers to distinguish a point of difference for their business, Parkes highlights the significance of “doubling down” on audiences through a composable tech stack that increases a business’ digital footprint and allows for optimisation rather than “being stuck with a monolithic tech stack” that is expensive and impossible to change. He asserts: “This sort of tech architecture allows you to plug-in, plug-out and be flexible, which allows you to innovate and change the experience you're providing to the customers in a more cost effective and quick manner. But you have to set up your tech stack in that way initially and, sadly, a lot of people aren't there yet.” Rufus Leonard emphasises that there are a number of routes businesses can take to develop a “robust” experience platform, including a commitment to a full enterprise stack, a vendor PaaS solution, a CMS that has some experience and headless features, distributed channel logic, or a centralised Experience Services Architecture (ESA) which a company owns. “If you want an option that lets you take control of your business experiences in a way that you own, is highly portable, open source and more easily maintained, for many modern businesses your best option is a centralised Experience Services Architecture,” the company highlights. Additionally, Rufus Leonard explains that connecting brand purpose with a company’s tech stack involves uniting people from across an organisation, particularly the chief marketing officer (CMO) and chief information officer (CIO). “By connecting and powering the experiences your CMO craves, with tools and systems from your CIO, you can deliver differentiation. Bring them together by aligning around your brand vision to help focus and prioritise,” the company notes. A hotel’s online platform is “at the heart” of this business-critical relationship as it “facilitates growth and efficiency”, allowing a hotel to easily create new highly personalised services and expand with new partners or new channels using your services. For a hotel to connect its brand purpose with its tech stack with, Parkes draws on four key considerations, the first being capitalising on contactless and AI experiences which are a “key trend” in the sector, as well as having “maximum flexibility” in the tech infrastructure. According to Parkes, automated experiences are being increasingly utilised as in-person brand and guest contact decreases, hence many businesses are introducing Amazon Alexa or Apple Siri into properties as “virtual assistants” to inform guests about restaurant and spa opening times, things to do in the local area, checkout times and wake up calls. “By connecting and powering the experiences your marketing team craves, with tools and systems from your technology team, you can differentiate from the many other staycation providers cashing in on the boom,” he declares. Secondly, a hotelier’s tech stack must be “headless” - meaning the architecture allows the business to separate the head/front-end from the body/back-end of the technology, therefore content is “not tied down” to the presentation and it can be reused on any channels. Additionally, it must also be composable; “split up, or compose, your functionality into separate APIs so they are independent and powered by an elastic microservices architecture,” Parkes declares. Nevertheless, the tech stack should also be API-first; by considering the business as a catalogue of API services, it will be “easier to extend” in the future. “This type of architecture is efficient as upgrades and new features can be released with less effort, allowing you to focus on the value you want to deliver to customers,” Parkes explains. Hospitality brands have “a wealth” of first-party data available to them, so “if collected, stored and respected in the right ways, your customers’ data can open up brand new avenues” in personalisation, rewarding and encouraging loyalty, and it will also “cement you as a trustworthy brand to eagle-eyed staycationers”. However, where do hoteliers often go wrong when marketing their business? “The biggest missed opportunity that we see within the hospitality industry tends to be for smaller players, because the larger international players tend to have spent proper money on their tech stack and digital presence,” Parkes reveals. However, for independent or small hotel chains, they have to “make do” with inexpensive platforms where the performance of the website “isn't as good as it could be”. Parkes explains these sites, although popular among the smaller players, are slow and therefore Google will downgrade the site in terms of the page ranking. This means that a hotel’s site won't be found when people are searching. He adds: “It takes nothing to really improve the performance of your website and dramatically increase the number of people who visit. That can change fortunes. Having high performing websites that are fast therefore will be found.” Furthermore, once potential guests eventually visit a hotel’s website, it must be “simple'' for them to book; “you'd be surprised how many hotels miss the trick,” he says. All in all, for staycation providers to capitalise on the staycation boom, Parkes emphasises that businesses should increase discourse with guests regarding feedback. By doing so, guests can “make their expectations extremely clear” to the hotelier; he concludes: “Nobody benefits if guests aren’t vocal about where expectations are missed. If everyone is being clear, experiences will improve for everyone.”