Derek Picot; John Strickland

One way hotels could improve the guest experience is by refraining from flooding our inboxes with feedback surveys

Feedback, I am told, is the ambrosia of the gods for service providers. That’s all very well for those that receive it, but where is the reward for those that give it? I’m pretty tired of getting back from a business trip and finding my inbox cluttered with every supplier that I used asking for my commentary on their services. The airline, my car hire and the hotels I stayed at all use their possession of my email address to send their requests for my opinion.

If I am sufficiently bothered to click into their surveys, I reckon I could waste a good half an hour ticking boxes and adding remarks. Some of these requests for my observations suggest I might win a prize by being added to a draw. Who, I wonder, ever wins? Are there lists of those who benefit? I doubt it, with data protection prohibiting the dissemination of anything remotely personal.

DUBIOUS MOTIVES

Why are we getting this constant deluge of requests to help businesses improve themselves? Hotels are the worst. It never happened 30 years ago and I blame the internet. Ever since that innovation, hotel chains have been using electronic survey tools to track guest satisfaction and monitor quality among their properties. Based on an analysis of chains that have purchased the industry guest satisfaction surveys by JD Power (a US-based global marketing information services company), hotel brands with higher scores apparently make more money than those with lower ones.

Well, that makes sense, and it proves that these surveys are just a cheap way of asking me to improve someone else’s enterprise. And while the business traveller might wistfully think that their suggestions are being taken into account to improve their future experiences, it’s actually only the scores in the boxes that are being used by an anonymous head office to monitor operational management’s effectiveness.

The pressure is on the operator to keep satisfaction high, and numbers can be manipulated by the design of the questions and the focus of the form. Trend history shows that respondents consistently rate facility higher than service. Removing some of the questions about service and adding a few about the quality of the bedding and so on can spin the overall scores positively.

Wherever service is involved, it appears that satisfaction scores dip. The School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University in the US has produced a number of studies of such surveys that show a 20 per cent drop in approval ratings between physical facilities and, for example, the food and drink offering.

All of this seems to indicate that questionnaires can be designed to fit whatever the originator wishes to hear.

LIMITED RESPONSE

On top of that, the demographic of respondents indicates that it is mainly leisure travellers who complete questionnaires. Most are frequently galvanised into action only by either a very good or a very poor experience. Consequently, most guest satisfaction scores do not reflect wide opinion, and business travellers, for reasons of time and focus elsewhere, probably do not have their opinions reflected to any significant extent.

A new Cornell study – Hotel Performance Impact by Socially Engaging with Consumers by Chris Anderson and Saram Han – indicates that many travellers wish to be left alone. Their research shows that hotel operators are badgering customers to such an extent that questionnaires are becoming a major turn-off for consumers. In the wider context of responses to guest commentary on sites such as Tripadvisor, they strongly suggest that less is more. Hoteliers who overreact to guest comments are creating negativity among potential new customers and are better advised not to provoke ongoing dialogue about satisfaction issues. Satisfaction scores appear therefore to reflect only a specific segment of the total business and it is probable that corporate travellers account for only a minority of the input. Are hotels now recognising that the whole exercise of guest solicitation is probably flawed by the structure of the questions and the demographic of the respondent? I hope so.

Hotels should judge their performance not by irritating me with their email requests but by reading the unsolicited commentary from guests who post it on third-party websites.

With luck, the ubiquitous guest questionnaire may soon have had its day.

These surveys are just a cheap way of asking me to improve someone else’s enterprise