Managing guest communication for hotel groups is tough. The bigger the brand, the more complicated it can get.
But the truth is that if you don’t invest time in creating a strategy and use a generalistic approach, you’re leaving revenue on the table.
Guest communication is a powerful tool not only for revenue but for brand recognition and reputation, and when talking about multi-property hotels, it is even more important.
In this article, we’ll discuss five practical, proven tactics for improving guest communication for hotel groups.
The best part? You can start implementing them immediately.
You might belong to the same brand, but every location has its own assets, attractions and essence.
By targeting the journeys according to the property, you can highlight your distinct offerings at each location, especially if you have different types of guests at every place.
For example, some brands have an airport location where the most frequent guests are business travellers during a layover. What you offer, and the way you engage them, should also be different.
At The Usual, they have different journeys based on the property location. While in Brussels they highly recommend specific amenities; in Rotterdam, the recommendations change. Listen to what Anne Williams has to say about it in this video.
By segmenting your messaging strategies according to property type and location, you ensure every guest receives content that's timely, relevant, and engaging.
Use this matrix to guide you and give you an idea of the differences between locations. Build your own based on your brand.
Learn more about creating and tailoring guest journeys in this article: 8 tips for creating a guest journey
Another big problem in guest communication for hotel groups is the missed revenue because properties operate in silos.
Sometimes, properties use different PMS (Property Management Systems) and the data is not shared between them. As a consequence, a guest stays at one hotel, has a great experience and then gets no follow-up about sister properties.
Without cross-property communication, you're leaving money on the table and missing a chance to build lifetime value.
So, how can you fix it? Use guest communication to introduce guests to your other properties at the right time.
Here are some guest communication examples for multi-property hotel you can steal:
- Scenario A (City to Resort):
Email flow template: "Enjoyed your city stay? Here's 10% off our seaside sister property next month."
- Scenario B (Budget to Upscale):
WhatsApp message template: "Looking for a special experience next time? Try our boutique hotel. Exclusive 15% returning guest discount."
- Scenario C (Heritage to Urban Adventure):
SMS template: “Loved exploring our historic city hotel? Next stop: our vibrant urban property in Berlin: modern art, street food, and a welcome drink on us. Book now!”
One more thing to keep in mind is that communication will remain as a difficult angle to master if your data continues to be siloed. You need a system that is designed for multi-property setups and shares data across properties.
In multi-property hotel groups, guest communication often becomes a tangled web of overlapping responsibilities. Does this sound familiar?
One hotel sends a promotional message while another is dealing with a guest complaint and there’s no clarity on who’s in charge of what. The result? Delayed responses, inconsistent brand voice, and a poor guest experience.
What can you do about it? Establish clear roles and responsibilities between the cluster (or central team) and each individual hotel.
This ensures accountability, faster response times, and a more professional and consistent guest journey, no matter which property the guest interacts with.
Take a look at this table for Cluster Communication Governance:
Pro tip: Create a simple communication SOP (standard operating procedure) that every property follows. Not only does it save time, it also ensures no guest falls through the cracks.
When each hotel in a group creates its own messages from scratch, the brand experience becomes inconsistent.
One property may sound polished and premium, another casual and unstructured. Guests notice and it erodes trust. Inconsistent tone, language, or formatting also slows teams down and leads to mistakes.
Multiply that across 5, 10, or 20 hotels, and brand voice quickly becomes fragmented. It also eats up time: writing from scratch, updating contact info, fixing tone mismatches.
Thinking about what to say to your guests? This is why value-led guest communication works
Templates help you to solve this problem. You can standardize your messaging with templates that reflect your brand voice, while still allowing room for local relevance.
Smart template examples:
Pro tip:
Bookboost CRM offers personalisation tokens, so you can automatically adapt details like hotel name, guest info, or property-specific amenities. As well as dynamic templates, so if one element changes (like a new social media handle or updated check-in time), it updates everywhere, saving time for the entire hotel group.
Must-read: How Bookboost helps multi-property hotels manage their communication
Most hotel groups aren’t tracking guest communication performance in a consistent, cluster-wide way.
One property might monitor WhatsApp response times, another just looks at reviews and no one has a clear view of what’s actually working. Without the right KPIs, it’s impossible to optimise or scale guest communication effectively.
What can you do about it? Define a shared set of KPIs that reflect both speed and impact across all your properties.
Then, track them in a simple cluster-level dashboard. This gives you a real-time overview of what’s performing well, which hotels need support, and where to test and replicate winning tactics.
Pro Tip:
If you don’t have a CRM where the reporting is centralised, use tools like Google Looker Studio or Excel to create a lightweight, visual dashboard your whole team can access. Colour-code by property or region, and include monthly trends to spot performance shifts.
One of the biggest advantages of being a multi-property hotel group isn’t just scale but the ability to test, learn, and roll out what works.
When you have multiple properties, you can trial a new messaging tactic, guest journey, or cost-saving campaign in one hotel and, if it proves effective, apply it across the group. That’s not just smart marketing, it’s operational efficiency.
Take Ruby Hotels, for example, a lean luxury hotel brand with 13+ properties in major European cities. By testing a stayover housekeeping opt-out campaign in one property, they found the right messaging to drive uptake. Once it worked, they scaled it across all locations, leading to significant savings in staff hours and cleaning costs.
In all this process, they partnered with Bookboost. Read their whole story here.
Whether it’s driving upsells, increasing engagement, or improving internal workflows, structured guest communication isn’t just about talking to guests. It’s about building a smarter, more profitable operation, one message at a time.
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