What Will You Learn?
What you don’t know can hurt your bottom line. In today’s operating environment, where hoteliers have limited time to walk each floor of their property and visit each guestroom, traveler feedback is invaluable for improving your property’s operating stature. Guest feedback can help keep hotels informed on everything from musty odors in the hallway near the hotel pool to Wi-Fi dead zones preventing guests from enjoying complimentary internet in the guestroom.
“[Having a guest experience management platform] made a huge difference with our guests, reviews, and, honestly, our maintenance, because it gives us the ability to get instant feedback from the guest. It puts all the reviews in one place. We also can use it to make sure we’re addressing issues before guests arrive. We noticed within three months of implementing, our online reviews increased by 1.5 points, a significant difference on platforms like Google reviews.” — Venita Yelley, Operations manager for MCM Elegante Hotel and Suites
When operators can easily view feedback from post check-in/out reviews, direct and two-way text messaging and more from directly within the hotel PMS in realtime, they can nimbly react to issues they would not typically see until multiple guests have been impacted. Studies show that a hotel utilizing real-time feedback mechanisms identified frequent complaints about slow check-ins. By addressing this promptly, they reduced wait times by 40%, leading to a notable increase in guest satisfaction.
What’s the Message?
Lastly, hotels can also leverage guest feedback to learn how travelers prefer hotels to interact with them. Between email, SMS communication, voicemail, and your app of choice, everyone wants to be reached on their own terms today. Your hotel needs to embrace an effective guest messaging strategy powered by your hotel’s PMS, such as SMS, which can push messages directly to and from guests and operators equally.
Simplifying your property’s messaging and delivery process is of the utmost importance today. Operators don’t have time to cross-reference offerings, capabilities, amenities, room availability, and more across three or more tools, and then use a separate app to message guests. All of these features should be available directly on the hotel PMS platform, and an all-in-one PMS could easily manage the above processes without any integrations or breaking a sweat.
Operators with access to two-way SMS delivery can help create a chain of communication between hotel workers, leaders, and guests, which can be used to maintain consistency and reduce the introduction of errors into your property’s workflow. Most importantly, it helps the hotel operations team feel empowered to make these decisions and solve problems, rather than being proud of themselves for successfully navigating a complex technology infrastructure to deliver the basics to guests.
Measuring Impact
Every hotel today is chasing consistency. From operations and daily rates to guest satisfaction scores and room turnover times, listening to guest feedback helps hotels understand where their properties are thriving and need a little extra attention. And while not all consumer feedback is valuable or constructive, knowing where you could improve is better than believing ignorance is bliss.
Hotels are physical assets that age and degrade over time. They experience significant foot traffic and undergo fantastic levels of wear and tear each year. This is true regardless of location, chain scale, and clientele. However, today’s greatest differentiator is who is and isn’t listening to their guests. Hotel leaders have the opportunity today to differentiate their properties from competitors by dialing in on the details, greasing the wheels, and smoothing out their imperfections to deliver the experiences guests demand.
Guests know what makes for a standout hotel stay. If your team has traveler feedback in front of them, baked into the PMS where they are equipped to make a difference during their stay, guests will never know what served them.
About the Author
Audrey MacRae is the Vice President of Maestro, a cloud and on-premises PMS solution for independent hotels, luxury resorts, conference centers, vacation rentals, and multi-property groups.
