‘Thank you for your feedback’ is easy to say.
But when a guest takes the time to complete a survey, they’re giving you something far more valuable than a polite response can cover. They are giving you their time, their experience, and their expectations.
The real question is: what are you doing with it?
After all, feedback is more than just corporate jargon. In hospitality, guest feedback is everything. Typically collected via surveys and online reviews, this feedback acts as a direct channel to bridge the gap between your perception of the hotel and the reality for your guests. With feedback, you don’t rely on assumptions that could result in wasted money, but rather ensure effective resource allocation.
Guest feedback provides actionable insights, helps you allocate resources effectively, and directly impacts your operations. More than just complaints or suggestions, it helps you understand how your property is performing, according to your most important stakeholders — your guests, giving you strong signals on what is working and what needs improving.
For hotel groups, guest feedback offers the chance to, amongst other things, benchmark the performance of all hotels in the group, maintain the quality of your brand’s services, and boost revenue through service personalisation.
Even though collecting and acting on feedback is key to optimising the travel experience, according to Expedia research, only half of businesses rely on customer reviews to measure the guest experience. If your business is one of those that views measuring feedback as too much effort and can’t see the value, let’s take a deep dive into the benefits of measuring and analysing guest feedback for your hotel group, and the best way to do so.
5 Benefits of measuring guest feedback for hotel groups
1. Maintaining standards across the property group
Personalisation is no longer just a buzzword in the hospitality industry, and with good reason. Guests, past, present and future, expect personalisation in all your communications with them, including any marketing material you send. Personalising guests’ experiences can then prompt return visits and positive reviews.
Each property in a group must maintain this standard. The failure of one property will impact the profitability (and reputation) of the entire group. Measuring and analysing guest feedback allows you to identify problems quickly and fix them before they damage your brand reputation. It’s an efficient way to ensure your service standards are upheld across every unit of the group.
Besides, by measuring your guest feedback, you can identify if the problem is isolated, if it’s only related to a specific unit, or if it’s a brand problem. When you compare your unit’s performance, you can benchmark the results and avoid any bias.
However, when properties are spread across multiple locations, it is impossible for group or area managers to physically keep watch over all of the properties they are responsible for, and even managing them digitally becomes painfully hard to do without the right technological tools.
Group reporting tools for guest feedback (whether online or offline) are one of the quickest and easiest ways to track guest satisfaction – the cornerstone KPI of any hospitality business. By viewing guest feedback from multiple properties in a group report, hotel group managers can set concrete, numerical targets and hold individual properties accountable when they do not meet these targets.
2. Personalising marketing efforts and the guest experience
Personalisation is no longer just a buzzword in the hospitality industry, and with good reason. Guests, past and prospective, expect personalisation in all your communications with them, including any marketing material you send them, and personalising guests’ experiences can prompt return visits and positive reviews.
Actively managing guest feedback and reviews not only allows you to understand guests in a highly personalised way, but also helps you be more targeted and specific in your marketing to them. Imagine the power of being able to send specialised offers to guests who enjoyed a particular experience at one property to encourage them to visit another, or knowing which guests to focus on when spending to drive guest loyalty.
Personalisation can help to create the emotive, memorable experiences guests are looking for. Even small amounts of personalisation can create a more positive experience, prompting a guest to become more loyal to your brand and spend more with you in the future. One study by Deloitte suggested that in transaction-based businesses, such as hotels, customers spend 37% more with brands that deliver personalised experiences.
Maintaining a high level of individual attention to guests is also essential when competing with the more flexible, smaller chains and independent hotels, for whom embracing new trends and technologies is an easier, faster process. Your Guest Relations, for example, can use guest feedback to personalise the experience and turn your guests into brand ambassadors.
3. Driving revenue and building guest loyalty
Guest feedback is more than a measure of satisfaction — it provides valuable insight into what drives revenue. When guests have positive experiences, they are far more likely to return, recommend the property to others, and spend more during their stay.
Listening to guest feedback also helps hotel groups build stronger relationships with their guests. By systematically collecting and analysing feedback, hotel groups can identify which parts of the guest journey have the biggest impact on loyalty and repeat bookings, providing invaluable insights into their hotel’s strengths and areas for improvement.
Guest feedback also highlights what encourages guests to spend beyond the room rate. Comments about memorable dining experiences, personalised touches, or thoughtful amenities reveal the moments that turn a good stay into a memorable one.
When hotel groups understand what creates these moments, they can replicate them across properties and deliver consistent experiences that encourage guests to spend more on upgrades, food and beverage, and additional services.
Perhaps most importantly, guest feedback helps hotel groups focus their efforts where they matter most. Instead of relying on assumptions, they can use real guest insights to improve experiences, strengthen loyalty, and drive better results across the entire portfolio.
4. Enhanced operational management across the group
While price remains a top consideration, 30% of travellers view ratings and reviews as a key factor in booking a hotel. The only way to improve your services and get 5-star reviews is to listen to what your guests are saying. But listening is just the first step —you must make it a priority to show that guest feedback directly influences your hotel operations.
As a group, it is vital that you maximise return on investment by informing your operational decisions with concrete data. Due to the far-reaching effects of strategic, operational, or financial decisions when made on a group level (as opposed to those made for individual hotels), every decision counts – and can have positive or negative ripple effects on guest experiences across the hotel group. This is especially true when properties within the group offer unique experiences and need to reflect this.
The ability to collect guest feedback data from individual properties and aggregate it across the group helps group management make more relevant changes or upgrades based on their guests’ wants and needs, and directly monitor the effects of any decisions made. To make the biggest impact, try to address the most common complaints or issues first.
Group managers can also spot recurring problem areas that need addressing group-wide, as well as being alerted quickly to issues so they can be dealt with promptly before any damage to reputation or income occurs. By addressing the problems quickly, you’ll be able to improve guest experience and increase guest satisfaction at the same time.
5. Group reports and decision making
Guest feedback shows you where to best spend your money. Budgets are often tight, so knowing where to prioritise is a big advantage. Without this insight, investments in your hotel could well be wasted, while you ignore areas that really need addressing.
Collecting guest feedback from individual properties also improves communication between individual hotel managers and group managers or owners, and other key stakeholders within the business. Using real guest data can help motivate or inform decisions across the board, providing one single place to manage guest expectations, whatever your position or location.
With effective group reporting, information collected about a guest before, during and after their stay can be shared easily across your group. This ensures that the next time the same guest stays at one of your properties, their experience exceeds expectations.
Group reports also allow you to collect data to spot emerging trends in guest preferences that can guide your potential strategic adjustments, such as changes in services or structure improvements.
How to collect guest feedback for my hotel group?
Your guests’ time (and yours) is precious, so you need to be effective in collecting feedback. Back in the day, hotels would ask guests to leave their comments on a card using a pen and paper. While we love the nostalgic, analogue feel, this approach would hardly work on a large scale for hotel groups.
Here are the most common and simple ways you can collect guest feedback:
- Online questionnaires
- Email surveys and automated direct feedback
- In-room tablets
- Face-to-face interactions
- Comment cards
If you struggle to gather feedback, there are many strategies to encourage your guests. Most of the time, a simple, polite request can go a long way. Most guests are willing to share their experiences; you just need to make it convenient for them. You can also offer incentives like discounts or a welcome gift for their next stay if they complete the survey.
However you collect the data, make sure that you are asking the right questions. Without the right questions, you’re unlikely to get the kind of feedback that you can use for informing operational decisions, managing staff or marketing your hotel.
How to analyse guest feedback (with real-life example)
The ugly truth is, however, that there’s too much feedback and simply not enough hours in the day to review and analyse what is being said about your business. Especially when running a hotel group, you need more sophisticated and powerful tools to help you manage your various properties to remain competitive.
Take The Hotel Folk Group, a group of six privately run hotels in Suffolk, UK, as an example. They faced this very problem: multiple feedback channels but no consolidated data. Without a centralised view, decisions were made without appropriate analysis, which could lead to missed opportunities for vital hotel improvements. Maintaining their high standards across all units was also a significant challenge.
Luckily, today we have technology that allows you to monitor, manage, and measure guest feedback across your individual properties and at the group level. With the right software, you can track and manage your online reputation and guest feedback for all the properties in your group, presenting the data in a format that’s easy to understand.
One such option is GuestRevu AI Group Reporting. It allows management teams to instantly surface the insights that matter most, providing one single report (instead of multiple tabs) that quickly summarises property performance and highlights the top brand-wise positive and negative impact areas for proactive resolution.
The AI analytics offers an overview of how the entire brand is performing, helping identify brand-wide issues. Leaderboards can be broken down by sentiment, offering comparative reporting across properties and quickly highlighting areas like service issues at specific locations. Not only does this save time for the management team, as you no longer have to dig through the data, but it also highlights trends across the brand and individual property level.
In the short video below, David Scott, CEO of The Hotel Folk, explains how guest feedback was managed before the GuestRevu solution and how it helps him now:
By implementing GuestRevu’s AI-powered features, they were able to uncover insights and save time. What’s more, they saw their overall Net Promoter Score rise from 52 in 2018 to around 63.5 in 2025, which is a significant result that exceeds the industry average of 40 to 55 for a good NPS, according to research.