Nowadays people seek for lifestyle recognition; having their special interests, personalization of talents, and many characteristics which define their uniqueness facilitates personalization of services which people receive as guests all over the world.

Traveling has already become personalized, letting destination explorers pick options they would like to experience when traveling. This trend inevitably expands to hotels. But how can hotels cater for all this diversity of personalities?

Couple of decades ago, hoteliers started making packages and special offers for guests thus dividing them into different groups: business travelers, conference participants, spa lovers, just married, couples traveling. All these packages included subjects of interest for each group. But with the growing market diversification this is just not enough anymore. Hoteliers need to become more personality-oriented and lifestyle-specific.

Nowadays, we are talking about something quite intimate. Hoteliers have to show understanding of the guest's talents and endeavors. Without the effective addressing of what each guests enjoys and loves to experience, hotels will never get customer loyalty. At the same time, employing a variety of options for each guest is cost ineffective.

Therefore, hotels need to know exactly what types of people are staying at their property and what they are looking for in terms of experience, not just facilities. And the only way to become personality-oriented is to position themselves as lifestyle-specific.

Each hotel is to become a place for the specific social groups. As diversity grows and expands, the demographics of target markets becomes segmented, too.

If the hotel knows how to differentiate itself, customers will be attracted more often, feel loyal to the place of stay, and even apply viral marketing thus raising sales and brand awareness among other target markets (which are usually people with the same lifestyles).

The main purpose lies therefore in the implementation of the following issues:

• identifying the lifestyle orientation of the hotel based on its location, design, facilities etc.
• segmenting target markets into several lifestyle groups
• creating personalized items which target each of the lifestyle group in particular.

After applying all these issues in practice, hotels will not only be able to increase sales revenues, but also increase brand awareness and win competition by stabilizing their market position.

Mila Petruk is a hospitality consultant and a founder of Milina Outsourcing Management (MOM) which provides consulting to hotels and restaurants including mystery guest audit, temporary staffing and training support. Being a hospitality industry enthusiast, Mila has a global insight into the developing trends of hotel and restaurant business all over the world. Having a rich international hotel work experience and an MBA from one of the reputed Swiss hotel schools, she has applied it in almost every hotel department she had worked. Contact Mila at mila.petruk@gmail.com.