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.
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 GuestRevu’s award-winning 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:
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Use Guest feedback to craft a hotel experience that meets guests’ expectations
If you know what your guests expect, it may go without saying that you do what it takes to meet their expectations. However, few hoteliers can claim to get this right every single time with every single guest.
Even when hoteliers understand what their patrons anticipate in a stay, mistakes do happen. Guest feedback can help you identify these shortcomings, and ensure they don’t happen again. More importantly, monitoring guest feedback at scale and over time can help you spot trends and deal with emerging issues as soon as possible.
Sometimes the smallest disappointments turn a great experience into merely a mediocre one. Whether the shortfalls are big or small, it is essential to keep track of precisely when an experience went wrong and where it can be redeemed. GuestRevu is the perfect tool for pinpointing areas that can be improved upon – before they result in the property missing the mark altogether for their guests.
Trends or frequently expressed guest opinions can also help you to allocate your budget and make operational changes at group or property level that will have the biggest impact on the guest experience.
Experienced hoteliers tell us how GuestRevu helps them to meet their guests’ high expectations and deliver the experiences that their guests anticipate in the slides below:
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Use Guest feedback to help your team meet expectations
No property is going to get guest experience right every single time. There’s too much room for human error. But it’s also this human factor that can truly make or break a guest’s experience at your property.
Guest feedback can help you to not only identify where human error may be occurring and where you should focus your training efforts, but also boost morale, inspire friendly competition, and ignite a sense of camaraderie and a willingness to go above and beyond to make guests happy.
Here are five more tips for getting the best from your hotel’s team
We asked some of our clients to let us know how they use the feedback that they get from GuestRevu to boost morale and promote teamwork — see their responses in the slides below:
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Use Guest feedback to refine your marketing message
It’s natural to want to show off your best room, with the most incredible view, and all the luxury that you’re able to provide. But if your brochure and website only feature images of your one honeymoon suite and none of your 43 standard rooms, you’re not really showing potential guests what they can expect to experience when they visit.
If you’re highlighting only your top-end services, your guests will arrive with heightened expectations, and leave disappointed when their experience doesn’t quite match up.
So how do you ensure your marketing material isn’t creating inflated expectations that will result in disappointment, while still encouraging bookings by putting your best assets on display? Here’s how some hoteliers use guest feedback to get their marketing messaging just right:
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How can hotels get all this valuable guest feedback?
Guest feedback can add immeasurable value to any property in understanding the experience that their guests have, and how they can be improved in ways both big and small. But not all feedback is created equal – if you’re not getting answers to the right questions, or only getting feedback from a tiny fraction of your guests, your data will be incomplete.
We asked experienced hoteliers from around the world how GuestRevu helps them to get the feedback that they need, here’s what they said:
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Guest experience is the cornerstone of the hospitality industry, and when guest feedback is thoroughly analysed and insights are used to inform staff training, marketing and operations, it can have an invaluable impact on the experience any hotel can provide. GuestRevu can help you gather feedback, manage your online reputation, and provide memorable and meaningful experiences to your guests.