Managing a hotel is all about making tough decisions and finding answers to difficult questions: Where do you spend your limited budget? Whose side do you take – a valued employee’s or a guest’s? Do you motivate your staff with the carrot or the stick? Does the expensive wifi package really make a difference to guest experience, or could you get away with a cheaper one? How do you find out who is pulling their weight and who is napping in room 8?
Without data to inform your daily decisions, you can be left acting on impulse (or worse, not acting at all) and prioritising what you assume will have the biggest impact on guest experience, not what actually does.
We asked a couple of hotel managers, marketers, and group CEOs how they use guest feedback technology to help them understand their hotels from multiple perspectives, and gather the data they need to make informed decisions about budget, human resources, and guest experience.
1. Assign budget where it will matter most to guest experience
Choosing where limited budgets should be spent will always be one of the most important, and most difficult, tasks for hotel managers. However, as Bianca Grobbelaar, General Manager of the Royal Guest House in South Africa, has come to realise, paying attention to guest feedback can help her make more informed choices about where money should be spent.
“We are in a situation now where, budget-wise, we only attend to the most important things affecting our guests,” says Bianca, who uses GuestRevu to monitor guest feedback and online reviews. “I thought, for example, that the staff uniforms were not as presentable as they should be. When I got my report, however, I noticed that I was being rated consistently high on staff! Knowing that staff was currently my strongest asset meant that I could redirect the funds to a lower rated aspect to try improve that area instead.”
