Hotel Business Review Archives

With so many measurement tools on the market, it can be difficult to determine which ones are the right solutions for your hotel or property. How do you know which ones you need? How can you combine them in order to get a well-rounded view of the guest experience you’re delivering? In my experience, there are six measurement tools that, when implemented properly, can generate a truly 360-degree view of performance. This article will help you navigate through your best measurement options and come up with the measurement plan that best suits your organization.

The purpose of the article is to certainly touch upon the importance of the service standard, but also, we will dig deeper into situations that can perhaps be damaging existing standards. Perhaps you may not have any to begin with, so how do we start developing a base set of service standards, while identifying where we best fit in the market (or in this case establishment scale)? Let’s take a look (from an end user’s standpoint) into a hospitality establishment that has obvious service standards, vs. a comparable that has them (service standards in place) but not being implemented or executed properly..

Points based programs will always have a role in a hotel’s overall loyalty marketing strategy, but the true value of the programs is in the behavioral rich transactional detail that can give marketers insight into the attitudes, preferences and opinions of their customers. Using this data to create strategic and tactical marketing programs is a must for success and differentiation.

Savvy Lodging Managers are actively pursuing the ways and means of greater efficacy in “gaining and retaining” customers. This article presents a helpful overview of how the savviest among us are methodically gaining insight into customer needs and then directly employing targeted value-propositions to meet those needs. The name for these activities is, of course, Customer Relationship Management or CRM. It takes both focus and technology to consolidate, automate, and synchronize business processes that help acquire, develop and retain customers. This article is geared to lodging managers who want to be more competitive and successful in the battle for bookings from today’s travel consumer.

Loyalty is a very complex, emotional concept, which is why it presents danger when training programs are built around increasing guest loyalty. If businesses want loyal customers, they have to get in it for the long haul and they will earn loyalty only after they have gained trust. Trust is built by a series of repeated actions, not words, or flavor-of-the-month campaigns.

Clearly when a program is just about rewards, loyalty isn’t achieved. Loyalty is defined as “faithful” and faithful is defined in part as “allegiance” and “trust”; neither of these can “points” alone achieve. After all, aren’t points what programs share in common? Loyalty results from one’s ability to gain trust. Loyal guests are actually saying, “I trust that you will recognize me as the individual that I am.”

Earlier this year, American Express conducted a survey exploring attitudes and preferences toward customer service. The survey revealed seven in ten Americans (70%) are willing to spend an average of 13% more with companies they believe provide excellent customer service. Even so, the same survey indicated that six in ten Americans (60%) believe businesses haven’t increased their focus on providing good customer service. Among this group, 26% think companies are actually paying less attention to service. Consider these three truths about exceptional customer service..

Frequent travel programs present much value to weary travelers, who often consider their benefits as well deserved awards for the not so glamorous experiences associated with air travel. Furthermore, these programs create loyalty by recognizing the select few as more valued customers. They provide travelers with the perks of convenience and a feeling of importance. Understanding each business’ unique strengths is necessary in order to allocate the right amount of resources to retain their customers. An increase of the quality of experience when staying at a hotel necessitates focus on those areas which are key drivers to creating loyalty.

The Holy Grail in the hotel business is, obviously, customer loyalty. The way in which most hotel brands achieve this – or try to achieve this – is by means of customer loyalty and frequent guest reward programs. They are all extremely expensive and occupy a disproportionate amount of management time and focus. While there is no suggestion that this approach be dropped (it’s far too late for that), this article discusses some of the inherent weaknesses in these programs and some of the ways in which individual properties can build true customer loyalty by focusing on the experience they deliver to their guests in their city in real time.  

The rise of user-generated content is one of the most disruptive forces in hospitality since hotels moved their marketing materials and booking engines to the Web. Why? User-generated content is the great equalizer of marketing. It allows consumers, not brands or properties, to own the reputation of a hotel. It allows boutique hotels with small marketing budgets to compete against large chain hotels with lavish loyalty programs. It allows great service and quality to drive marketing through consumer reviews.

Customer loyalty programs have continued to proliferate in a wide variety of firms both inside and outside of the hospitality industry. Customers have come to expect some type of reward in return for patronage. Despite this widespread growth, managers frequently question the actual value that these programs contribute to the bottom line. In this paper we offer a number of bases that might help managers think beyond their current program.

As the volume of feedback from traditional customer feedback sources continues to decline - response rates from these channels have fallen from 50% in 2007 to 28% in 2011 - mentions per brand, region, and even unit (or product) per year on social feedback channels are increasing exponentially. Customer satisfaction can no longer be relied on as a metric to predict loyalty. The presumption has been that satisfied guests will remain loyal. Research shows, however, that customer satisfaction does not always equal customer loyalty.

Loyalty programs are under fire these days; from being cookie cutter to not producing a return on investment. Is your loyalty program missing opportunities to maximize the experience – and the spend – of visitors who might fall through the cracks?

Brand loyalty can mean many things. Most hoteliers would agree that loyalty certainly means likelihood to return to a hotel, likelihood to return to the brand, and likelihood to recommend the hotel and brand. With the rise in popularity of social media, the last component—recommending the hotel and brand—has taken on even greater significance. Similarly, a loyalty program can be many things. Today’s hotel loyalty programs are highly evolved marketing campaigns and should contribute to brand loyalty as defined above. Some of the questions and concerns hoteliers have are discussed in this article.

Have you ever thought of having an outside hospitality professional conduct seminars, training or talk to your staff about innovative ideas to improve service levels? If not, have you thought of having someone assist you in developing and using as a tool to train your employees? Do you use outside trainers? That said why not use hospitality and hospitality/service educators to execute this? The reason we ask is because industry professionals predict that the climate of the hospitality industry will improve in the long term yet we are seeing that as changes are impacting the industry, there is still a lack of properties embracing innovative ways of improving their service, which impacts their bottom line.