Modern ways of interacting with customers are increasingly reminiscent of Times Square – flashing lights, running lines, noisy advertising on radio and on television, bright banners, newspapers and flyers.

Everybody seems to shout: «Buy from me!».  And once the overall noise is increasing, your task is not to be louder than competitors. Your task is to create a «bubble of silence» and find out a way in which your employees and customers will hear you.  And as practice shows, the most effective way today is gamification.

The essence of gamification is to bring the game component into the structure of a business project.

By introducing a similar system into business, we create a vector of people’s behavior. Gamification is based on our emotions, such as, excitement, motivation, involvement.

This is not a game in its classical sense with graphics, dialogs, and special effects. The main component is the path that a player needs to go through for one or another achievement.

Gamification represents the best way to create and interest in people ever invented and the most successful companies IBM, McDonald`s, Marriott, Microsoft, Deloitte have long been using this technology to gain superiority over customers.
The Marriott hotel chain was one of the first to test possibilities of using gamification to attract staff.

Experts have developed a game about a hotel similar to Farmville or The Sims, where the player must perform all the duties of a hotel kitchen manager.

 Users get to know this industry, at the same time received virtual rewards that improve the hospitality sphere in their eyes.

The rational for creating the game is quite simple: Marriott is entering new markets, companies need new employees. They are trying to attract representatives of the Y generation – those who are now between 18 and 27 years old – and interest them in a career in hospitality [1].

Gamification is based on three main pillars: a loyalty program, a game mechanism, about which we have already said, and behavioral economics.

What is a loyalty program? This is the process of attracting and retaining customers in any business. Usually the loyalty program is built on discounts, bonuses and cashbacks, points, which allows customers to play the game with the company and at the same time recommend this company to their friends. For example, the Hilton loyalty program offers its guests to earn Hilton Honors bonus points for staying in hotels and resorts from the Hilton portfolio. These bonus points can then be exchanged with Hilton’s travel, shopping, food and entertainment partners [2].

Yes, we can safely talk about gamification in large networks of the hotel industry, but what about with small business or hotels, which are private and not included in network marketing? After all, in order to make your loyalty program you need to spend a huge budget.

The market is now actively developing and modernizing, and therefore applications are emerging that are based on client loyalty and include a huge functionality, which includes a loyalty program, a CRM-system that will help to digitize your customers, and the KPI (Key Performance Indicators) module, which will increase the efficiency of your staff.

The only platform that combines these indicators is the company GIS (Global Intellect Service)[3], representing the UDS-game application, which the client can use for free and arrange the game mechanism with the company. I think that this is the most effective solution for the hotel business because this instrument allows, firstly, not to spend a huge amount of money on advertising and promotion. Secondly, to digitize all customers, which is really essential for direct interaction with them in case of solving any problems, and, thirdly, to increase the turnover of hotel services, because the customer will recommend this hotel and receive points and bonuses for it.

So, we can conclude that, thanks to the introduction of gamification, the number of clients in the business is certainly growing, since it is because of this that the clients see that they are taken care of and identify their necessary needs.