Gain Insights and Enhance Your Hotel Services with Guest Feedback

Customer insights and guest feedback are crucial parts of your business. Without them, you won’t be able to understand your market, which may lead to faulty services and poor marketing plans. In this article, we’ll go through the importance of customer feedback for hotels, how to collect them, and how to best use them to improve your brand’s reputation.

What is guest feedback in hotel?

Guest feedback is the customer insight from guests about their hotel experience. It’s usually gathered through guest survey forms, online review posts, social media comments, and other online messaging correspondence. Comprehensive guest feedback collection covers feedback for service staff, sales staff feedback, and even marketing.

Aside from guest feedback, hotels can collect customer insight through guests’ booking behavior, inquiries, complaints, and customer profiles.

What is the importance of guest feedback in hotels?

Guest feedback is essential to any business, and hotels are no exception. Hotels need to receive feedback from their guests to understand how they are doing, what aspects of service need improvement, and whether or not the travelers' expectations are being met or exceeded. The timing at which a hotel offers a survey or feedback form to its guests is also very important. You can give surveys during check-in, but it's essential to consider the guests' mood and state of mind when offering them. If they have just arrived after a long journey, it is best to wait until they have settled in before asking them to complete a survey.

It is also important for hotels to provide multiple channels for guest feedback. This could include online reviews, online surveys, comment cards in each room, or even face-to-face interviews with staff members. By providing multiple channels for feedback, hotels can ensure that all guests have an opportunity to share their thoughts and opinions about their stay. Additionally, this will help the hotel gain valuable insights into how they can improve their services and better meet the needs of their customers.

What is the importance of guest satisfaction in hotel industry?

Guest satisfaction is the most important business metric in the hospitality industry. Hotels with high guest satisfaction scores generate higher revenue than competitors because of increased customer loyalty. Aside from this, satisfied guests post online reviews and do organic word-of-mouth advertising, which attracts new customers.

How do I get feedback from hotel guests?

With the rise of social media, customers now have a wide range of tools to share their experiences with hotels, both good and bad. Booking, TripAdvisor, Google, and other channels offer consumers a public platform to provide feedback on their stay. While these channels can help gather guest input, they may not accurately reflect overall sentiment due to unreliable data or a lack of representative samples.

To get the most out of customer feedback, hotel operators need to use quantitative means such as surveys or questionnaires to evaluate guest sentiment. This allows them to understand more comprehensively how they are performing and what areas need improvement. Surveys also allow customers to leave detailed comments about their experience, which can help identify potential issues before they become major problems. By combining qualitative and quantitative methods of gathering guest feedback, hotel operators can ensure that they provide the best possible service for their customers.

How do I encourage hotel guests to give feedback?

To be successful, hotels need to develop a culture driven by guest feedback. By paying attention to what guests are saying about your hotel online, you and your staff can better understand what you're doing right and where you can improve. There are several ways to operationalize guest feedback to increase the satisfaction level among guests.

First, it's essential to actively monitor reviews on different platforms such as TripAdvisor, Google Reviews, and Booking.com. This will help you identify areas that need improvement and also give you an idea of how satisfied customers are with their experience at your hotel. Additionally, responding promptly and professionally to all positive and negative reviews is essential.

Acknowledging customer feedback shows that you value their opinion and care about their experience at your hotel. To learn more about the importance of online reviews, click here.

Another way to create a guest feedback-driven culture is by giving surveys or questionnaires after each stay. This allows customers to provide more detailed feedback about their experience, which you can use for further analysis. Additionally, it's important to reward customers who provide positive reviews or take the time to fill out surveys with discounts or other incentives. Finally, ensure that all staff members are aware of customer feedback and take the necessary steps to address any issues that may arise.

By implementing these strategies, hotel operators can ensure that they provide the best possible service for their customers and create a positive guest experience.

How do you handle guest feedback?

Here’s how hotel managers can make the most out of their guest feedback:

1. Go over reviews during weekly meetings.

Having weekly meetings to read reviews is a great way to keep staff morale high and ensure that everyone is focused on providing the best possible experience for guests. Using a positive sandwich technique can help with this by starting with a good review, following it up with a negative one, and ending with another glowing review. This will help remind staff of the areas where your hotel is doing well while highlighting any consistent themes in guest feedback - both positive and negative.

For example, if you find that guests are consistently praising your hotel's check-in process for being remarkably fast, then you can use this as an opportunity to motivate your staff and encourage them to maintain those standards. On the other hand, if there are recurring comments about bellhops not being friendly enough, you can use this as an opportunity to discuss how they can improve their service to provide a better overall experience for guests. Reading reviews in weekly meetings ensures that everyone knows what needs improvement and what should be celebrated.

2. Celebrate positive reviews.

When a customer takes the time to write a glowing review of your hotel, it is an opportunity to celebrate! Not only does it mean that your hotel and staff exceeded expectations, but it also serves as a great way to recognize your employees' hard work. It is important to call out any staff members mentioned in good reviews and reward them for their efforts. You could do this through bonuses or an annual raffle program for those mentioned by name in positive guest feedback. Celebrating these wins will show appreciation for the staff and encourage others to strive for excellence in their work.

In addition to recognizing individual employees, celebrating review wins can also be used to boost morale among all team members. By highlighting positive reviews on social media or displaying them around the hotel, everyone can share their success and feel proud of their accomplishments. This will help create an environment where everyone is motivated to provide exceptional service and ensure that guests have a memorable experience at your hotel.

3. Train employees to request feedback.

Training staff to ask guests for reviews is important to increase the volume of reviews and feedback. The best time to ask for a review is at checkout or other staff-guest touchpoints when the interaction has been positive. Staff should be trained to use language that conveys appreciation for the guest's stay and emphasizes their feedback's importance. For example, they could say, "We want every person's stay with us to be a special experience, and we monitor our TripAdvisor feedback carefully. If you have a few minutes when you get home, would you mind going online to let us hear your thoughts on what we're doing right, as well as our opportunities for improvement?" Additionally, sending out post-stay emails soliciting guest feedback can be helpful.

By training staff members on how and when to ask for reviews, hotels can ensure that they are getting valuable customer feedback that will help them improve their services and offerings. This will help them better serve their guests and increase their visibility on review sites such as TripAdvisor. Asking for reviews politely and appreciatively can make all the difference in getting more positive reviews and feedback from guests.

Click here to learn more about how you can make the most of your TripAdvisor profile.

4. Utilize reviews for training purposes.

Using reviews as training exercises is an effective way to prepare staff for troubleshooting guest complaints. By using positive and negative reviews, staff can better understand how to handle different types of customer service issues. This training exercise allows staff to learn from real-world examples to be better prepared when dealing with guests.

When running these training exercises, it is important to ask each staff member questions such as "What was done right here?" and "What could have been done better?" This encourages critical thinking and helps the staff develop their problem-solving skills. It also allows them to practice responding to customer feedback professionally. By reviewing reviews, staff can gain valuable insight into how they should approach customer service situations in the future.

5. Respond to every online review.

Responding to online reviews is important in running a successful hospitality business. It shows past and potential guests that you care about their experience and are willing to take the time to address any issues they may have had. When responding to reviews, being professional, courteous, and understanding is important. Positive reviews should be acknowledged with a thank you for taking the time to share their experience. Negative reviews should be addressed in a way that acknowledges the issue and offers solutions or ways to make it right. Mixed reviews should also be responded to politely, thanking them for their feedback and offering solutions if needed.

There are many factors to consider in how you should reply to positive and negative reviews, you can know more about them by clicking here. However, it's worth noting that responding to reviews may take time, effort, and resources which you could use to improve your services further. So, it's imperative to find a way to respond to every online review without sacrificing that much time.

Fortunately, an AI review reply generator allows you to write replies to online reviews without being burdened by a long and winding writing process. You can generate optimized and engaging replies by simply copying the customer review you wish to attend to–making your reply process 3x faster. The AI reply assistant automatically extracts the review's crucial points, generates the best possible answers in reference to these points, and even translates the reply if needed.

Guest satisfaction surveys vs. online public reviews

Guest satisfaction surveys and online public reviews are two different methods for gathering feedback from customers. Hotels typically conduct guest satisfaction surveys to gain insight into customer experiences with their services. These surveys often ask customers to rate their overall experience, as well as provide comments about specific aspects of the hotel such as the cleanliness of the room. On the other hand, online public reviews are written by customers who have had an experience with a business and post it publicly on websites such as Google, Booking or TripAdvisor. These reviews can be positive or negative and give potential customers an idea of what they can expect when visiting a business.

Both guest satisfaction surveys and online public reviews can be beneficial for businesses in different ways. Surveys allow hotels to collect detailed customer feedback that can help them identify areas where they need to improve. At the same time, online public reviews give potential customers an idea of what they can expect when visiting a business. Additionally, both types of feedback can help companies build trust with their customers by showing they are willing to listen to customer feedback and take action to improve their services.

It's also imperative that all reviews on your online channels would not be left unattended. Upon reviewing the comments, collecting data to improve your hotel's services, and relying them to your team, ensure you update the customer that necessary actions are being taken about their requests. This will make your customers feel seen and validated, increasing customer loyalty.

Click here to learn more about how to reply to positive and negative reviews online.

Responding to guest reviews with AI.

Replying to online reviews may sound laborious if not done correctly. To follow these best practices in enhancing your hotel services, your team would be brimming with auxiliary tasks such as feedback collection, weekly meetings, regular training sessions, and more. To take one task off their hands, it's best to get an AI reply assistant.

The MARA AI reply assistant allows hoteliers to write the best reply possible for online reviews and guest feedback without starting from scratch. You can boost your brand's online presence without sacrificing your team's precious time, which could be used to serve your guests better.

Aside from this, it can also help you execute best practices for enhancing your hotel services, such as:

• Automatically generates a summary of each review for your weekly meetings;
• Boost your online presence to attract more guests;
• Improve overall star rating to help you gain rapport with guests to participate in more quantitative surveys;
• Quickly note training points for your employees from negative reviews; and
• Optimize positive reviews for marketing purposes.

Enhance your hotel services by responding to guest feedback in the easiest and quickest way possible.

Improving your hotel services is an infinite process. The continuous flow of customer reviews and market trends would always show that there's an area in your company that you could improve on. While this may be difficult to sustain, your hotel must respond to these points of refinements to maintain a good brand reputation.

Having an AI review reply generator takes one step from this cycle, allowing you to focus your time, energy, and resources on other areas of your business.

Reply to guest feedback and online reviews in the easiest and quickest way possible. With one click of a button, you can get a fully optimized and engaging reply that could truly satisfy your guests. Register for a FREE MARA account today.

This is a part of our hero content on “Online Reputation Management for Hotels".