Privacy concern is a remarkable issue among customers.
How can hotels manage customers’ data and gain their trust?
The hospitality industry fundamentally relies on customers, and therefore it is inevitable that customers’ information will be accumulated to improve their experiences further. However, concerns surrounding data privacy are salient in contemporary society, significantly when technology has advanced substantially. LegalJobs revealed that nearly 80% of all Internet users feel they do not gain control over their data. Nevertheless, we have to acknowledge that customers’ data are vital, and thus there are ways to protect their data to avoid privacy breaches.
1. Creating privacy consent
While Internet users are constrained to sign and agree with the terms and conditions before using any products or services, it is time that hotel businesses did the same. This might be regarded as a reciprocal process where both sides exchange benefits, with customers signing the consent and hotels complying with the permission to use the data properly.
Hotel privacy policy should be implemented.
For promotional purposes, the hotels can adjust the privacy policy to ensure that the guests make informed decisions about their purchases. In addition, collecting cookies and information about customer behavior can be beneficial for companies to analyze their product performances. Customers can then personalize their experiences on online platforms and obtain appropriate services according to their needs.
Yet, the hotels should also consider how these data could help hotels improve their services instead of engaging in nefarious actions.
2. Not selling to other companies for profits
Selling data to other retailers will prevent customers from giving information.
As the customers cannot fully administer their data since they are interrelated with several services, the businesses are obliged to avoid taking advantage. According to Statista , 40% of Internet users were apprehensive that their sensitive personal data would be sold to third parties and utilized in the decision-making process without customers’ consent. Some hotels gain alliances with other companies to sell their customer profile , which has caused a stir in customer privacy concerns. Consequently, the customers will soon lose trust and refrain themselves from information disclosure.
3. Install applications or licensed products to avoid data leakage
In order to protect the data, the businesses themselves cannot contain and manage all the information available on the Internet. Some applications were introduced to preserve the customers’ privacy such as LoginRadius. To alleviate the concerns, LoginRadius has multiple authentication implementations to verify the identity, and gain compliance with legal issues on collecting and storing data. The data is encrypted, and customers’ consent should be reached.
Install apps to avoid data breach.
For the third parties to collaborate with the hotels, they need to validate their credibility by earning privacy certificates. For instance, PCI DSS Certificate granted companies to operate on cloud-based systems and secured information storage. The PCI DSS is an information security standard created to enhance cardholder data security for organizations storing and processing credit card data. Some platforms that achieved this certificate can foster trust with the customers regarding data preservation.
4. Data storage consent
Data storage is important for companies to analyze customer trends, yet there needs to be consent. Analytics Insight.
Generally, companies wish to store customers’ information to analyze customers’ purchasing patterns and their behavior. However, the dataset that businesses collected tends to expire in around a month. After that, all the data will be renewed, and the hotels would only be able to track within the time span of one month. Therefore, if the hotels want to collect the data from the previous months, they need to acquire consent from the customers to download all the information instead of utilizing them without agreement from the other side. Having all the consent forms initially with guests will protect both parties, and hotels are highly encouraged to apply a system that incorporates the display of consent forms into their daily operations.