Blue Sky Marketing has updated their luxury hotel benchmarking report for mid-2013, parsing results from client hotels' guest surveys to reveal cross-property trends.
The report, available here, focuses exclusively on luxury and boutique hotels that utilize the company's proprietary guest review collection service. The report saw a much higher rate of return as far as guest feedback is concerned: 3,702 actual guest reviews versus 658 on TripAdvisor during the period of April 1st through June 30th.
Of these directly collected reviews, 1.9%, or 4.8 on average, were negative, while TripAdvisor saw 5.3% net negative reviews.
The potential for negative experiences to be privately collected, and directly addressed before becoming public record, is a very clear advantage. And, of course, nearly all of the reviews were positive, an indication of the ability of luxury properties to ideally deliver better service experiences across the board.
Compared with results earlier this year, guests continue to be driven by previous experiences with a hotel or via a direct word-of-mouth recommendation. More respondents chose "Other" in this particular batch, which is significant as it leaves a large gap in relevant takeaways. Noticeably absent from impacting choice of hotel is advertising or earned media.
Another point of comparison is to look at how guest satisfaction stacks up when considering how they came to make the booking in the first place.
The ability for the hotels to gain their own world-of-mouth marketing is vital, as seen in the earlier result of how guests heard about a hotel, and thus providing a guest experience the fuels word-of-mouth is increasingly important to the independent hotel business.
The UK-based results can be read in full here.