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Metaverse in Hospitality- Enabling immersive experiences for Hoteliers and customers
Metaverse in Hospitality- Enabling immersive experiences for Hoteliers and customers

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While we talk about Metaverse in hospitality industry, the first question we would get in our minds is how can metaverse be useful to hospitality industry? Can Metaverse solve the current challenges of the hospitality industry and how would customers react to it?

It is too early to predict what opportunities would Metaverse bring for the hospitality industry and what would be the impact in future. However, in coming years, most people will spend a significant amount of time daily in an immersive environment for entertainment, work, education, shopping, or banking purposes. Metaverse, a mix of augmented and virtual reality, is one of the key elements of the futuristic digital world, what we call the ‘Web 3.0’. The world of Metaverse will possess various elements of a virtual world like AI (Artificial intelligence) blockchain technology, non-fungible tokens and even cryptocurrencies. While Metaverse is still in its nascent stages, it has a lot of potential in terms of creating an interactive technology that enables digitally driven social interactions.

Experience driven industry

Hospitality is a service and experience driven industry and metaverse can enable lot of functionalities in future like visiting a hotel virtually for booking purposes or holding meetings in a virtual hotel environment. Metaverse can be leveraged to host global summits, weddings, music concerts and even sports events in virtual stadiums. The hospitality industry can draw customers to an immersive experience while booking tour packages, hotels, resorts, and recreational facilities. With Metaverse, filling physical forms or talking to chatbots would become obsolete. Hotel employees would be more focused on cognitive and meta cognitive thinking and empathy for customers, automating the rest of the processes. The futuristic customers would look at quality of experience during their trips and stays. Many Hoteliers have already started embracing new technologies in the metaverse space. As the metaverse moves to the mainstream in next few years, the role of hotel staff would also change.

Technology driving robust business operations

Metaverse would be helpful to Hoteliers in driving business operations seamlessly. It can be used for learning, training, and development purposes. Hiring staff can also be one of the applications of Metaverse. The opportunities are vast and hotel businesses need to start learning and exploring this technology to remain competitive in future. Metaverse would help hoteliers to improve their sales (generating leads) and hotel marketing strategies, increase revenues and help with day-to-day operations.

Let us first talk about Sales and marketing. The world of Metaverse enables the hoteliers to reach a larger audience with the least investment. This universe can be leveraged by the sales stakeholders to reach even potential customers along with current ones. From a revenue generation and management perspective, Metaverse can be used as an upselling tool. If we talk about booking platforms, there is an increasing interest among businesses in enhancing the booking experience. As metaverse aids in creating a seamless booking experience in future, the probability of customers completing their bookings without backing out will increase. The process will be more enjoyable with the use of augmented reality and virtual reality. Imagine a customer being able to view a hotel reception virtually for booking even before physically visiting the same. In a metaverse environment, customers will be able to take a tour of museums, reserve restaurants, visit and explore casinos, compare various hotels and even dance at night clubs. Lastly, with metaverse, day to day operations would become easy for the hoteliers as the professionals can connect with their colleagues or managers in virtual real estate. Metaverse would aid real time collaboration to solve potential challenges quickly.

Immersive experiences for customers

Though the concept is in nascent stages, it would help in streamlining the process, enhance customer experience and thereby increase customer loyalty. With the advent of technology, booking experiences have been transforming. Hotel booking was done physically at the hotel, but with the advent of the internet, bookings were made online, comparing various brands, and talking to chat bots. However, it lacked the experience factor. But metaverse bridges this gap and provides a virtual environment of interacting with customers where bookings can be made by ‘Meeting without physically meeting’ the hotel manager. For instance, a customer can sit at home, interact with a hotel staff hologram, and take a tour of a hotel as well as surrounding attractions as well. So effectively, a virtual connected client would become a real revenue generating client which, otherwise, would be difficult to reach.

One of the key elements in the world of Metaverse is the use of NFTs (non-fungible tokens). NFTs are unique in nature, and they can serve as replacements for check-in tags, room keys or access codes. NFTs exist on blockchain, and they can be in any form like a room key, cruise ticket, flight tickets, or even music passes. It aims to involve customers in an inventive way with the power of the metaverse.

Securing the future of hospitality

As metaverse gets introduced to the world, the competition globally would intensify as organizations would be willing to dominate the world of immersive experiences. It changes the way people meet and interact with each other. With growing applications of metaverse, the hospitality organizations need to address concerns pertaining to security and privacy of customer data. Metaverse would have an ocean of data collected from customers and this can allow organizations or even governments to have access to customer behavioural patterns and other personal data. We saw an uptick in the cyber-attacks with the world going digital during the pandemic. So, it would be interesting to see how the potential of metaverse is leveraged keeping data and privacy challenges at bay. Are Hoteliers ready to explore metaverse?


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Romil Shah
Senior Research Analyst

Strategic Research Advisor and Senior Analyst with an experience in market research and visual design, assisting sales stakeholders on market and competitive intelligence, thought leadership (authoring whitepapers), customer advisory research initiatives and strategic research initiatives for leadership.

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