For a guest, a bad stay far outweighs a “meh” stay, but for a hotelier, the opposite can be true.
I recently attended Aimbridge Hospitality’s annual Aimbridge Summit Live! 2023 conference held for the company’s hotel general managers, directors of sales and other on-property leaders. While there, I sat in on a roundtable of general managers across the U.S. and Canada speaking on their roles as leaders, working with staff and the guest experience.
The thing about the bad versus the meh stay stood out to me.
“Now, it's almost as if it's that so-so, middle experience that could actually be worse because you don't know how to fix it necessarily,” said Jessica Thompson, general manager of the Voco Franklin in New York.
Bad experiences could mean a mistake, like a room not being serviced when it’s supposed to be, said Ralph Mahana, general manager of the Windsor Court Hotel in New Orleans. That gives hoteliers a chance to make it right and turn the experience around. The so-so experience is forgettable.
Having only ever been a guest, I never thought about it from that perspective, but it makes complete sense. How many of us deal with small annoyances and just let them be without addressing them? How often do we decide that something is just fine and move on? It’s just not worth the time and effort, often because we don’t want to be seen as someone who complains over the little stuff.
But the little stuff can add up.
If I had a great time or had a great experience created by someone at a hotel, I’m likely going to tell that person, and I’ll tell other people about it as well. If there’s something significantly wrong that I need fixed, I’ll let the hotel know, and they can do something about it. I won’t forget that there was a problem, but as long as it wasn’t an absolute disaster, the fix will likely take care of it.
But if there’s something small that’s fixable but doesn’t seem worth mentioning, I’ll probably be annoyed by it and just live with it. Maybe it’s an outlet that doesn’t work in the room. Maybe my food wasn’t prepared exactly as I ordered it. Maybe the shower takes too long to warm up. It could even be that nothing was wrong with the stay, and it was just … fine.
In those situations, I’m not going to say anything about it. I’m certainly not going to give a bad review, but I may not stay there again as I would look for a better experience elsewhere. I also wouldn’t recommend it to other people.
It all boils down to the goal each hotel staff has. If it’s just a basic stay where the room is clean, the staff is friendly and things generally work as they’re intended, then mission accomplished.
If the hotel team is trying to create a great experience, well, maybe not. To get there, that’s going to require knowing what your guests want out of their stay. That’s going to require engaging with the guests, learning directly from them as well as gleaning from their observed behavior.
Back at that roundtable, Mahana said this requires making an investment in the team, in the people who run the day-to-day operations of the hotel.
To create the experience guests are looking for, he said, “it doesn't necessarily mean spending more on products and goods. It's less about the product and more about the service and the connection more than ever.”
You can reach me at bwroten@hotelnewsnow.com as well as Twitter and LinkedIn.
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