NB: This is a viewpoint from Caroline Doherty of HotelTrail, a Colombia-based company providing hotel guest experience insight and analysis.
Some hotels think there’s some magic to getting a great reputation. There isn’t. It’s simple –the key is to provide a consistently great experience, which is in line with, or exceeds, what guests would expect for the rate they pay. If you do that you’ll have satisfied guests that are eager to return, and better yet, will tell the world how great you are.
Of course, to ensure you’re consistently giving guests the right experience you need to regularly measure and assess your performance and take action accordingly.
However, even with the vast proliferation of data available – not least the information available from public reviews on websites like TripAdvisor – hotels often struggle to understand the real guest experience that they’re providing.
The problem is two-fold.
First, the information they are using in their analysis is often unreliable or incomplete.
Second, the nature of the analysis does not go deep enough to be of any real value.
However, without understanding the real guest experience, hotels are essentially making pricing and investment decisions in a vacuum. Of course, by taking a stab in the dark you might just get lucky, but keeping your fingers crossed isn’t the most intelligent approach.
Research from IBM and MIT Sloan School of Management has found that, in making both strategic and day to day decisions, top performing organizations are five times more likely to use analytics than lower performing ones. This applies equally to hotels. Smart hotels will want to make properly informed decisions.
The need for clear and reliable feedback
Many hotels rely on online reviews to gauge guest sentiment. Whilst an analysis of comments-based reviews may identify particular themes, there’s a danger in basing decisions solely on this kind of feedback. Guests who have had an experience at either end of the spectrum are more likely to take the time to leave an online review. This can skew the sample and mean the picture that is presented is not reflective of the true guest experience.
Also, the way guests choose to express themselves in their comments can be highly subjective and open to interpretation. Even consumers are becoming somewhat wary of making decisions on the basis of comments based reviews.
It’s not unusual to read a review that says “worst experience ever” followed by another, for the same hotel, that says “the place of dreams!” With reviews like that you can see how a hotel might become easily confused about how they’re really doing. Which is why they need to look elsewhere to get the real picture.
Clearly hotels shouldn’t ignore online reviews, but they shouldn’t treat them as the only measure of guest satisfaction. Hotels also need to ask guests for feedback directly, and in a much more structured manner.
But even when hotels do seek feedback, if it’s to be of any value to them, they need to think carefully about what they’re asking guests and how they analyze their responses.
Time and time again I’m disappointed when hotels present me with the same traditional feedback form asking me to rate various aspects of the experience on a numeric scale or a scale of poor to excellent. When I’m given a form like that, I’m always reminded of a study I read in a psychology magazine years ago that said that when people are asked to rate the brightness of a light on a scale of 1 to 10, without any anchors showing what various points in the scale look like, the responses range dramatically. However, when people are shown in advance what various points in the scale look like, the responses tend to be much more accurate and consistent.
Guest satisfaction surveys used by hotels (and the rating scales used by many review sites) suffer from a similar problem. One person’s average might be another person’s excellent. Worse still, the same person, depending on their mood, might rate an experience as “poor” one day, and then rate it as “average” on another day.
What can this type of feedback really tell a hotel?
So what’s the answer? How can a hotel measure the real guest experience? Well what if, instead of providing scales using numbers or emotionally charged adjectives like “excellent” and “poor”, the scale were descriptive in nature?
What if, instead of asking guests to rate “bed comfort” on a scale of 1 to 4 (which, apart from anything else, is an incredibly boring question), you gave them a scale with a detailed description of the various levels of comfort? Just as with the light example, a feedback form structured in this way is much more likely to elicit the guest’s true opinion.
Intelligent Guest Experience Analysis: The difference between a good hotel and a great one
Obtaining unambiguous feedback is just the first part of the challenge. It then needs to be analyzed and turned into actionable insights that can inform decision-making.
I always wonder how hotels turn the ticks on the boxes of traditional forms into actions. How can they know what the priority areas they need to address are if they haven’t asked me, the guest, what’s important? This critical factor is missing from traditional feedback forms and online rating systems.
Maybe the lady who said the hotel was a “dream” was most interested in staying in a beautiful old building with the “wow” factor, and other amenities didn’t matter to her. Whereas for the person who had the “worst experience ever”, the food and beverage and in room entertainment system were critical and weren’t up to par.
And which of these factors is of greatest importance to most of the other guests? Only by knowing what matters to guests can hotels assess priority areas to focus on. Yet hotels rarely ask this question. They ask how it was for you, without asking what was important to you.
Finally, the analysis needs to measure the quality of the experience against the rate paid. No matter how good the guest experience at your hotel is, if guests don’t get value, they won’t be satisfied and that will influence their view of the hotel (and what they say about it to others).
I want to help hotels thrive (and, selfishly, as a frequent traveler I want to see hotels giving guests like me consistently great experiences). So I’m urging hotels to get smarter. I want hotels to gather reliable feedback and then intelligently analyze it by reference to what’s important to guests and the rates paid to come up with an action plan that will have the greatest impact on the guest experience.
Remember, it’s in the analysis that the magic happens.
NB: This is a viewpoint from Caroline Doherty of HotelTrail, a Colombia-based company providing hotel guest experience insight and analysis.
NB2: Lion cartoon courtesy Shutterstock and feedback eval courtesy Shutterstock.