For long, getting to know what hotel guests want has been every hotelier’s bugbear. Ambivalent, unclear suggestions from customers impede hoteliers’ ability to take concrete steps to improve their services. Moreover, in this era of price-oriented competition among hotels, price sensitive travellers; garnering loyal guests become challenging, necessitating the use of specific tools aimed at overcoming these problems.
Effective Guest Surveys
Comprehensive guest surveys help to obtain and analyse customer feedback. Let us look at ways we can carry out effective surveys.
-
Prune less effective feedback approaches:
The good-old questionnaires about the guests’ hotel experience may not be the most effective feedback gathering approach in today’s time. Guests are usually asked to fill those forms at checkout when a guest has already experienced a problem that could have been prevented.
Moreover, the intrinsic unresponsiveness of guests generates a less-than-authentic feedback. Hence, direct communication between guests and managers helps the latter know about customer’s needs and complaints, if any. Thus, it is advisable that hotels should ask for feedback during the guest stay.
-
Limit your feedback channels:
Overwhelming the customer with a repertoire of comment cards and online forms and social media review request is not a good idea, especially when people in general are bombarded with lots of communication all through their day. Since all the travelers are tech savvy now, you can easily do away with physical feedback forms and stick to Online Guest Survey Forms. You can get plenty of useful information with just one or two tools.
-
Humanise and personalise the experience:
You can get the guests to reveal much more specific information about their stay experience in personal interactions than on a piece of paper or online forms. This increases the survey authenticity and helps the hotel staff also assure the guest that their problem will be looked into immediately.
