You know your hotel intimately. You know where to sit to get the best winter sunshine, you know where the dirty laundry is stored (literally), but you don’t know what it’s like to be a guest at your property. You simply can never experience the hotel the way your guests do.
NB: This is an article from GuestRevu
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In fact, it’s the very fact that you know it so well that makes it impossible for you to see where your guests might have misunderstood your marketing, made false assumptions, or had expectations you’re unable to meet.
This is why guest feedback is an invaluable tool in hospitality. Talking to your guests, understanding their expectations and experiences from their points of view, and then assessing, understanding and acting upon the insights you get from the data is key to running a successful hotel business.
What guests expect vs. what they experience
Excellent guest experiences are often a result of exceeding your guests’ expectations, while disappointing experiences come from not meeting them.
Exploring the disconnect between what guests expect and what they get is referred to as the “gap model” of analysing service quality, and has been studied extensively. The reasons for this disconnect, or gap as it is often referred to, can be broken down into four different areas of friction:
- Hoteliers don’t understand what exactly guests expect
- Hoteliers can’t provide what guests want
- Hoteliers could meet guest expectations, but human error gets in the way
- A hotel’s marketing image doesn’t reflect what an average stay is like, skewing guests’ expectations
In practice, these gaps are seldom seen in isolation, and unhappy or disappointed guests are usually the result of a combination of several of these factors, where the gap between what a guest expects and what they actually experience grows exponentially.
This is why hotels around the world have found it essential to use guest feedback surveys and online reputation management tools to bridge these gaps and ensure a guest experience that their patrons will want to return for again and again – and write wonderful reviews about!
Use Guest feedback to understand what your guests expect
The first step to providing an excellent guest experience is understanding exactly what your guests hope to experience. Hoteliers like to think that they know what guests are looking for from a stay at their property, whether it’s luxury, relaxation, comfort, convenience, or a combination of these and other aspects of a stay.
But, if they are not asking their guests directly, hoteliers often make assumptions based on what they would want to experience and extrapolate from there. While this may find them catering to guests like themselves, it will not necessarily help them to cater to the wide array of guests who may end up staying at the property.
So how does GuestRevu help properties to understand what their guests want? See what some hoteliers discovered through their guest feedback in the slides below:
