Functioning in the hotel industry: how to attract customers through multilingual customer service

In last year alone, travel industry accounted for 10.4% of the economic expenditures around the world. It grew around 3.9% in comparison to 2018. We can all hope to see it grow more by the end of this year as well. The growth can be attributed to people craving new experiences around the world. Gen Z and Millennials have shown their values to be different than the baby boomers; they want to see more of the world and have an altogether different experience than their parents had. We can even call them the ‘wanderlust generation’. However, there is one factor that might hinder experiences and be a barrier in the growth of hotels, i.e., language.

Welcoming Diversity

If hotels wish to expand their business; they must adapt in serving to people with different languages and cultures. Someone in the staff must be adept at another language and must be able to handle customers who speak a different language. Simply meaning, there should be no language barrier in the process. If foreigners are given a warm welcome in your hotel and someone can conversate with them in their own language; it will take your hospitality standards to a new level altogether.

Hire Others To Speak The Language Of Customers

Let’s say someone from Spain calls up your hotel and asks about the prices. If there is no one in the staff that speaks the same language, the person might get hesitant to book a reservation. The person is also testing the waters by talking to you and figuring out the standard of service he/she will receive once the person gets there. Let’s say that you are a small hotel but known for your hospitality; how will you make the potential customers see that he/she is not making a wrong choice by selecting you over others? The only solutions here would be to hire someone who speaks Spanish or outsource one part of the booking process to a Spanish call center.

Talking to someone in the same language as they speak would make a brilliant impression and might make the other person trust in you; eventually, paving way for long-term business between you and them.

Harm Of Not Being Multilingual

In these times, a hotel based near a tourist attraction can expect people to come over from any part of the world. Every hotel should focus on handling these customers else they are likely to lose business over a language barrier. Countries based in South Asia and Africa face most of the brunt of it. A country like Rwanda which sees a massive influx of tourists has a persistent problem of people not being adept in other languages making it a harder experience for customers. Countries like India also face the same problem where people are more trained to speak in English rather than any other language.

Going for call center outsourcing to solve this issue does help but spikes the cost for hotels. On the other hand, training people in secondary languages or hiring different people for various languages is costlier. You cannot hope to know which natives will come to your hotel. For example, you might focus on French but see an influx of Ukrainian tourists; that might get tricky to handle. Until they have sorted out the issue of training their staff to speak different languages, hiring multilingual call centers would be the only way out of the mess a hotel gets in tourist seasons.

Not only that, hiring non-native speakers for your hotel to better serve the customers might open a whole new can of worms. In that scenario, your staff might be able to talk to foreign customers but would have trouble conversating with you. If a situation arises where he/she must translate words for the customer and owner of hotel, it will take a long time to resolve and end up frustrating the customer.

Conclusion

If you want to survive, you must adapt to the business environment around you. Going multilingual is the only option here. Not only do you need to speak in the language of your customer, you should also translate your hotel website into different languages so that customers can get all the information they need on the web itself. Remember, ‘the customer is always right’. No matter which language he/she speaks.