1. Hyper-Personalized Experiences

Travelers now expect tailor-made experiences that meet their specific needs, with 71% of consumers seeking personalized services. Artificial intelligence and machine learning enable hotels to analyze guest behaviors, creating highly customized stays that boost customer loyalty and open new revenue opportunities. 

2. The Rise of Hotel Retail

To meet evolving traveler expectations, hotels are transforming into retail platforms, offering unique experiences and extra services beyond traditional accommodation. Personalized tours, culinary journeys, and spa treatments are becoming integral parts of hotel packages, enhancing guest satisfaction and increasing revenue. 

3. Flexible Payments

The “Buy Now, Pay Later” (BNPL) option is gaining popularity, particularly among younger travelers. In fact, 40% of customers prefer not to pay the full amount upfront. Hotels that adopt this payment model can boost profitability by encouraging higher-value bookings and longer stays. 

4. AI Concierge and Chatbots

In a fast-paced world, many consumers expect personalized, 24/7 service. AI-driven concierge services are revolutionizing the industry, with hotels integrating chatbots and virtual assistants to handle guest requests, bookings, and upgrades. This improves efficiency and reduces customer service costs by up to 40%. 

5. Customization at Every Stage

Booking a stay is just the beginning—guests want to personalize their experience with spa treatments, dining options, transportation, and on-site activities. Offering additional services throughout the customer journey enhances satisfaction, reduces cancellation rates, and increases the average booking value. 

6. The Gift of Experience

More people are choosing meaningful experiences over material goods. Hotels are responding by offering gift cards and vouchers for stays and services, giving consumers greater flexibility. The hospitality gift card market is expected to reach $4.2 billion by 2032. 

7. Self-Service and Minimal Contact

Around 80% of travelers prefer contactless options during their stay. Hotels and resorts are integrating technology to offer automated check-in, mobile booking management, and seamless service access without direct staff interaction. 

8. Stress-Free Travel

With ongoing uncertainties in travel, consumers are looking for guarantees and flexibility. Around 70% of travelers prefer booking options with flexible policies. Integrating travel insurance and flexible cancellation policies helps reduce cancellations and build customer trust. 

At Twissen, we have observed that the hospitality industry is evolving at an unprecedented pace, requiring adaptation to an ever-changing reality. The growing focus on sustainability and the demand for flexibility and convenience make it crucial for hotels to balance technological advancements with exceptional guest care. Embracing these trends will be key to staying competitive in the hospitality sector. 

Twissen

L'articolo A Recent Study Reveals the 8 Key Hospitality Trends for 2025 proviene da Twissen.

1. The Macro-Travel Trend
“The urge to travel is a stronger force than rising inflation”. Travel, indeed, turns out to be essential to people mental health. Proactive hoteliers are exploiting this desire to travel by providing customers with personalised communication to boost profits and enhance the customers’ experience with ancillary services.

2. The Digital Influence Trend
43% of travellers is influenced by social media when booking a stay, especially in the case of urban travellers belonging to Gen Z and Millennials. Also according to The 2022 Digital Transformation Report by Skift, digital transformations will drive travellers’ choices and experience in the future.
But, if the “before” and “during the journey” phases are more and more important in tourism strategies, the “post-stay” is still not being taken into consideration as it should. SiteMinder data shows us that travellers welcome contact at all stages of the guest journey, especially in the case of luxury hotels.  

3. The Bleisure Trend 
Among bleisure travellers, it turns out that 49% belongs to Gen Z, followed by Millennials. Considering this, we also need to keep in mind that one billion digital nomads are projected to be in the global workforce by 2035, it is therefore necessary for accommodation providers to be more appealing for this segment by providing the so-called “hotel of the future”. Promoting deals and hotel packages designed specifically for working travellers and based on a deep analysis of the target’s needs, would be a proper way to take advantage of this trend. 

4. The Trust Trend 
“Every digital touchpoint matters for the new trust-critical traveller”. As we already highlighted in a previous article, trust and human-centric approach are becoming the key to build confidence and increase customer loyalty. Two topics are fundamental in the case of the hotel industry:  
a. Metaverse: more than 70% of all travellers would ‘likely’ or ‘definitely’ pre-visit their property in the metaverse before check-in if they had the opportunity to; 
b. E-commerce experience: investing in secure payment processes can create significant advantages both in terms of brand perception and efficiency. The percentage of consumers who prefer to pay online varies depending on age and place of origin: 71% of Chinese travellers prefer to pay online, 56% of Italians would choose the in-person payment, while in the USA both methods are chosen. Regardless of the preferred payment option, what matters is that for 57% of interviewed travellers “an easy and secure booking and payment process is the top priority when choosing whether to book via a property’s website”. 

5. The Human Connection Trend 
“Tech-enabled travellers are not willing to compromise on human connection”. Technology, indeed, is not here to substitute the real and human experience, but to facilitate and enhance the customer journey management as well as create new opportunities for businesses to monetise.  

At Twissen we observed that, also due to the acceleration linked to the pandemic, accommodation providers must enter the digital era with a clear strategy, especially now that we are already considering the future implementation of the metaverse. However, we also have to keep in mind the most important lesson we learned during the past biennium: the human factor is what matters most, since staff and customer service are one of main reasons why travellers become loyal customers. Thus, resources should be allocated on both sides: technology as well as training.  

Twissen

twissen.com

L'articolo 5 accommodation trends to keep in mind in 2023 proviene da Twissen.

According to research, in the USA the number of working travellers grew from 6.3 million in 2020 to 10.2 million in 2021. As far as accommodation is concerned, the majority (51%) of digital nomads prefer to stay at a hotel, while other options include staying at a friend or family place (41%), at an Airbnb (36%), in a car, van or RV (21%) or at a hostel (16%). In addition, Statista affirmed that 47% of digital nomads around the world are composed of 30-years-old people.

Some hospitality providers are now adopting and implementing strategies to gain profit from this trend. It is the case of Pierre & Vacances, which is offering digital workers discounts on longer stays and on Wi-fi use in its resorts for the next winter.

In addition, in an interview by CNBC, Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky stated that he plans to capture this segment by generating experiences that make customers feel like they are living in a community rather than travelling to a temporary destination. This is reflected by the growing trend of co-living and co-working within the hospitality sector. Brands like Outside and Roam are offering multiple co-living spaces to digital nomads across the globe, giving them the opportunity to create networks and share experiences. 

At Twissen we observe that the segment of digital nomads is gaining more and more ground within the market and has potential to bring about some relevant changes in the hospitality industry even after the pandemic. The possibility for many people to smart-work from any destination can be exploited by players of the sector also to tackle seasonality.

Twissen

L'articolo Digital Nomads and Hospitality Trends proviene da Twissen.

Among the various services offered are risk-based products, which allow customers to lock in the price of hotels and flights, together with insurances that guarantee travel reimbursement. Demand for these types of products is therefore growing steadily: around 60% of users of the Hopper app, a free app that allows you to predict price changes for flights and hotels over time, have purchased at least one of these services.

Soon travel companies will be able to offer financial services to their customers. Through new banking technologies, airlines, hotels and agencies will be able to adopt loyalty programmes to encourage customers to use their financial services, i.e. virtual products that companies can incorporate into their services without having to become a regulated entity themselves. For example, travelers can pay a certain amount to lock the price of a flight or hotel reservation, in case the price rises, the traveler pays the locked price, while if it goes down, the traveler pays the new, cheaper price.
The opportunity to enable flexible BNPL (‘buy now, pay later‘) installment payments is also crucial at this time. According to a research by Phocuswire.com, 68% of travelers said that BNPL would encourage them to spend more than usual on travel, as it would give them the ability to make higher value purchases or add more ancillary services. 

In addition, more and more paytech innovations have appeared in recent years that can be exploited to facilitate the use of such technology. One example is tokenization, which allows merchants to encrypt and securely store customer payment information in their systems for future use. In fact, according to a study conducted by Lodging Technology in 2022, 68% of hoteliers want to increase the security of their stored data, and 58% of them have a primary goal of improving the privacy of their customers and employees.

At Twissen, we believe that tourism service providers should increasingly equip themselves with tech tools to move in this scenario by encouraging customers to use financial services embedded in their offerings.These solutions will simplify, digitize and automate the payment of travel, providing customers with greater flexibility and security, which are essential elements for restarting, especially business travel.

Twissen

L'articolo Fintech & development opportunities for travel & tourism proviene da Twissen.

A trend is rising, that perfectly applies to this general sector of luxury travel: hotel barging, a type of slow navigation on a converted barge. This type of tourism usually involves cultural travels, discovering non-mass places and local traditions. This is significant of a luxury- sustainable tourism. Hotel barging’s origins date back to the 1920s, when commercial barges started being converted into passengers’ accommodations in England. In the 1960s, hotel barging started being popular in France with the barge “Palinurus” (now named “Luciole”) which operated on the canals of the Burgundy region of France.

Hotel barging offers two different typologies of navigation. One is the all inclusive offer, where tourists can completely relax and are served with every luxury. The other typology is self-barging, which implicates an appropriate boat license. Self-bargers can usually benefit from the luxury of the boat and enjoy services of chefs and tourist guides, but are completely independent during the navigation.

With this purpose, network companies of hotel barging have been created. Successful examples of networks are European Waterways, H2olidays and Linssen Boating Holidays. The concept behind these networks is entrusting the management of the boats to single local realities, in order to offer the best service to the customers. The most popular destination that offers hotel barging services is France (Burgundy, the Loire Valley and the Canal du Midi), but the market has extended in Ireland, England, Scotland, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy (the Venetian lagoon).

As we can see from Voies Navigable de France’s statistics, the number of operators in France which offer this service has risen in recent year, as a respond to the tourist demand.

Source: Voies Navigables de France

Mr. Calzolaio, CEO and founder at Lagunalonga, a barge company in the Venetian lagoon, reported to Twissen that “the experience of hotel barging can be defined as a unique, exclusive and authentic experience. The tourist demand for hotel barging in Europe is rising mainly from USA tourists, followed by British, Australian, New Zealander and Russian. In the following years, the Indian will be a double digit growing market for us”.

At Twissen we observed that this segment can potentially overperform the market. There is also a rising interest from the travel agencies, which see in hotel barging an opportunity to organise attractive travel experiences to a demanding and profitable target.

Francesco Redi

President and founder at Twissen. Manager in Local Development, Tourism Policies,  EU Funds. He cooperates with several European universities, public bodies, development agencies, DMOs and enterprises.

L'articolo Barge Hotels demand rising in luxury travel proviene da Twissen.