Covid-19 changed the world of travel. The industry was hit hard by the pandemic and many hotels have taken innovative actions to keep afloat. After long lockdown periods and restrictions, people want to travel again, probably more than ever. But what changed then?

Guests have new angles on hotel experience, such as frictionless and contactless interactions, avoiding crowds at the front desk, to name a few. They’re looking for convenient end-to-end journeys with minimal effort and top-notch service. While there’s no silver bullet, biometric authentication will certainly help hoteliers to streamline processes.

In this article, we bring you 7 ways to improve the guest experience and satisfaction score leveraging on face authentication.

1. Online booking in seconds

When it comes to the hotel guest experience, there’s a lot of steps and information to give to complete a reservation. The process may hinder the restless guests: why do I need to type all my personal information just to book a room?  

An identity solution that combines face authentication with identity verification allows your guests to book a hotel with just a look. By integrating face authentication into your website or app, you can create a reusable identity for each guest when they book, through a virtual wallet. All guests need to do is take a selfie during the booking process, take a picture to their identity document and, using OCR, the system will take care of the rest.

2. Easy and frictionless check-in

People have started to experience everything at a high speed. One click, one look and it's done. What about check-in? Why not provide an amazing experience? People don't want to go through a long check-in process anymore or wait in line to deal with paperwork.;

As described in detail in our article "Online check-in that just works", face authentication technology can be leveraged to enable fast and seamless identity verification. If your guest booked a room a few days before, waiting at the reception will negatively affect their customer experience. Don't ask booking questions twice. Offer a fast, hands-free, and private solution with face authentication. Provide easy and frictionless check-in.

3. Pay by face

Is it that Turkish and Portuguese cuisine have common roots? This is one of the many topics that your guests can talk about while eating your specialties, instead of focusing on explaining their dietary restrictions to a waiter or trying to understand how to pay with their specific debit card. If you want to provide your guests with peace of mind and pure experience enjoyment, then simplifying their Food and Beverage experience and payment process is key.

With face authentication, the guest room and/or payment method can be associated to their face and a perfect guest experience emerges. Your guests can access the restaurant hands-free, pay by face at any point of sale, including self-service machines. What's more, you can provide personalized offers. Let your guests enjoy the experience, with the hotel adapting to their needs and not the other way around.

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4. Personalized experiences in the right context

Frequent travelers, especially business ones, are always in a rush. And they expect their frequent hotels to know their preferences, their personal choices and not have to repeat requests over and over again. Maybe even greet them by name when they arrive.

The first step in personalizing is recognizing your guest, potentially associating their face with a loyalty number or reservation number. We know how your CRM has all kinds of useful information about your guests. But how can you leverage that information and make it somehow useful if you cannot bring it to action in the right context? 

Face authentication is very fast, convenient, accurate and, above all, can be made privacy-compliant and trustworthy. With a single enrolment associated with a branded loyalty program or app, you can completely revamp your guest experience and provide the right recommendations or upsell options in seconds. Simplify your guest's life and improve guest satisfaction rates with a simple look.

5. Walk-in processes

Modern processes have most of the guest experience the other way around. Guests are treated as suspects until proof in contrary. They need to prove who they are in strict scrutiny; they need to provide retainer payment even before they enter their room; they need cards to access many areas of the hotel. In essence, guests always need to find the right way to do things, even simply entering the buffet lounge, when they’re just looking to have a great time and relax.

Turn that around by ensuring all checks are done automatically behind the scenes and your friendly staff can focus on helping and turning your guests' journey into a memorable one. With face authentication, you can give total freedom to your guests to enter special function areas such as conference rooms, spa, gym, buffet breakfast lounges and so many others. They can wander around like at home, be pampered by the experience, and feel they are in full control of what they can do every single instant of their stay. 

6. Dedicated human touch activities

Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.

-- Donald Knuth, Computer Scientist.

As Artificial Intelligence helps humans automate complex tasks, such as automatically processing guest data and checking them in to a hotel room, just by recognizing their face, human beings are freed to do high-touch activities that only humans can do. That's the art of humans, social beings at heart. Not only can your guests focus on doing what they enjoy most individually or as a group, but your staff can also be liberated to interact with guests and work towards higher rates of guest satisfaction. Nothing is more powerful than the fully dedicated personalized attention of friendly staff to make guests feel at home on any occasion. Automating processes will give hoteliers additional staff time to promote such premium invaluable interactions.

7. Overall elevated guest experience and privacy compliance 

When you look at the combination of these improvements, the truth is that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. By bringing together all the above experiences, your guests will feel a unified futuristic, seamless, personalized, high-touch experience and will want to return. They will rate your property much higher than what they would without these features. And, these days, customer ratings have a direct influence on your reservation demand and, ultimately, on the revenue per available room of your property or chain. Just imagine the end-to-end guest journey in a "do anything with a look" world.

Overall, the fact that all the above processes are automated, including identity-related ones, brings privacy and security to a whole new level. Just think about the liability and compliance issues hotel management teams need to consider when storing credit card numbers or passport scans. Should that really be a task hotels do on a daily basis? Or should they simply implement a way to associate a face to a hotel guest and then rely on external third-party services to store and deal with such sensitive personal identifiable information?

How can you offer these features to your guests? 

Youverse developed a registration mechanism that allows hoteliers to seamlessly verify users' identity using a personal identity document, face verification between a live picture and the identity document, and anti-spoofing/liveness checks to detect a real user performing the registration.

You200+ countries and territories enables scanning documents in about 140 languages spanning almost 250 countries and territories and it’s easy to deploy: with a plug and play mentality, it will take minutes to have it integrated into your application. And if you have questions regarding our software, you can book a 15-minute conversation with our experts — they'll be glad to help!