5 bulletproof ways guest feedback can boost your hotel revenue
As hotels navigate more bookings and busier operations, feedback becomes vital to improve the experience.
Providing key insight at multiple touchpoints, it’s an essential part of strengthening operations and building solid guest relationships.
And, it doesn’t stop there.
Gathering guest feedback has actually proven to boost bottom lines in a number of ways. Let’s explore.
1. Influence Via Reviews
Hotel reviews have become a top influencer on guest decision-making. Before booking a stay, guests are likely to check Google for reviews as the first thing they do.
In fact, according to TripAdvisor, 96% of their users say reading hotel reviews is important when planning a trip and 76% of travellers will pay more for a hotel if it has better online reviews.
So, how does feedback impact your reviews?
By asking for feedback, you become proactive in managing your brand reputation. Rather than having a guest jump to a review site to express their sentiments, asking for feedback encourages the guest to keep complaints in-house. With feedback, you can start a private two-way dialogue about how you plan to resolve the issue and even follow up later on.
Further, if you’re able to gather feedback at the moment, the guest becomes more forgiving and recovery becomes easier. This means better reviews and a greater influence on future travelers.
2. Improve Employee Performance
When you collect guest feedback, you pinpoint the exact departments and employees that need celebration or improvement. Similarly, you locate key touchpoints that need to be monitored.
Whether it be long wait times for dinner or forgetting towels in the room, asking a guest for feedback can help you understand employee performance and have healthy communication to achieve better service.
Again, this is an opportunity to be proactive in improving your operations and, in turn, revenue. While you could wait until a customer feels the need to tell you (which is harder to recover), asking for direct feedback can give you faster, more actionable insight. If you’re consistently capturing this data, you can use it to back up your requests or changes at quarterly meetings with employees or stakeholders.
3. Better, Tailored Services
The benefits of feedback can be applied to the experience as a whole, but here, we’ll focus on the services you provide your guests. Think spa services, valet parking, room service, fitness studio, or private work lounges.
Although the customer was likely top of mind when you initially set out to provide your services, over the years, preferences have changed. For example, your range of spa services could be a top seller, but maybe there’s a trending massage that you don’t offer but guests would be willing to spend more on. Guest feedback provides you with that insight, while also perfecting the services you currently offer.
The more services that match customer preferences, the more service bookings and opportunities for upselling, leading to greater revenue.
4. Understanding Stance In Your Industry
The past several years have been nothing short of competitive. With more hotels vying to get back to business, finding ways to differentiate yourself becomes a challenge and a drain on your bottom line.
With feedback from guests, however, you can get the upper hand on the competition. Get direct insight into how you’re performing amongst other hotels and benchmark your objectives. Whether you send a survey and ask outright how you compare to other accommodations or you ask suggestive questions and compare against competitor reviews, it’s an excellent opportunity to learn from the market and improve.
5. Boost Overall Pre, In, and Post-Stay Satisfaction
The quintessential way to make a guest happy is by delivering an experience that meets and exceeds their expectations.
This doesn’t just mean offering excellent services but also considering the check-in experience, communication channels, cleanliness, room upgrade options, post-stay contact, and more.
All of these elements contribute to overall satisfaction.
Collecting feedback is the most effective way to offer exactly what the guest wants. By asking them what they like, dislike and feel indifferent about, you can boost current guest satisfaction but also consistently enhance your hotel to impress future guests. With greater satisfaction comes greater revenue through repeat guests and referrals.
How To Measure The Guest Experience
It’s evident that feedback plays a vital role in developing a strong and successful hotel. It enhances guest relationships, builds a stronger team, and provides a deeper understanding of your stance in the market.
So, how can you begin to collect feedback to experience these benefits?
It starts with adopting a digital tool that can streamline the feedback process. Traditionally, feedback was captured with paper and pen - but today, there are efficient tools that can help you manage more feedback in less time.
As an example, with Flexkeeping and Benbria’s Loop Experience Platform, you can collect customer feedback and improve backend operations in real-time. With these two platforms working together, you will have best-in-class technology on your side.
Using automated triggers, if a guest provides feedback and expresses a less-than-amazing experience, Natural Language Processing picks up on keywords and routes the conversation to management. Similarly, if it pertains to a specific department, like Housekeeping, that message will get routed accordingly. This ensures the right people see the right feedback and can recover in the moment.
Lastly, a digital tool collects and aggregates data in a way not possible by paper. With insights, you can consistently keep track of the number of responses, common trends in feedback, how long it took to resolve a complaint and more. Access to this data allows you to hold regular meetings, draft strategies, and make sure no guest leaves your hotel unhappy again.
While measuring the customer experience can seem daunting at first, reaping the benefits after building a program can be immensely rewarding. Boosting your bottom line and providing you with invaluable insight, if you haven’t considered collecting feedback, this is your sign to start.
This was a guest blog post by our friends from Benbria, Leaders in Customer Experience and Engagement Solutions.
