Finding Out Priorities

The difficulty for most hotels is to develop some reliable priorities for their value package at a reasonable cost. This phase is definitely an investment and you will be able to use what you find out for a few years at least. You should probably employ an outside agency to conduct some focus groups with different types of users. Focus group participants will be able to add to your initial list of items and will be encouraged by the group leader to rate all these factors with a score out of ten.

Alternatively, you can use your customers to develop the priorities for you. This will not be as helpful or as accurate since you will not find out which factors are more important than others. However you will be able to establish how important they rate certain elements of your offer. Use a semantic differential scale with seven tick boxes: ‘not at all important’ at one end and ‘extremely important’ at the other. Then list the factors that you think are priority areas for each particular segment. You could ask a few guests to help with this list, otherwise you will only be measuring what you think is important not what your guests think is important.

For instance corporate users’ priorities could be:

• Bedrooms must have a large working area.
• Hotel staff must be helpful.
• Hotel staff must be friendly.
• Breakfast must be served within 30 minutes.
• Room service must be available 24 hours.
• Hotel must be flexible over early check out.

 

If you are interested in understanding your satisfaction rating with corporate bookers (as opposed to corporate users), then your exploratory research should probably be done by in-depth interviews with all the people that are involved in making corporate contracts. This will often not be confined to the actual booker, who may also have to consult with finance, the users, sales and marketing and purchasing. Sometimes it is a very complicated decision-making unit and you need to understand the influences of each party in the overall decision.

Once they have done this, you will have your baseline from which your customers can evaluate your actual performance.

Surveying Customer Satisfaction

Whenever you undertake a survey you will always be trading off the cost with the validity of the outcome. As I said earlier, questionnaires left in the rooms are almost useless, but who can afford to telephone every guest and spend half an hour on the phone? There would even be some inbuilt bias in this approach since it is unlikely that you would actually be able to speak to them all.

A compromise is actually to approach guests as they are checking out and ask them to spend a few minutes helping you before they leave. At least this way you can give the right questionnaire to the right market segment, and a personal approach will often persuade people to be helpful to you. Your questionnaire mustn’t appear too daunting or else they will put it in their bag and do it later. Likely story!

Your questionnaire should use the same priority list as before only this time with a different scale of seven tick boxes.

Corporate users’ priorities:

Bedroom working area is:	too small	big enough
Hotel staff are:	very unhelpful	very helpful
Hotel staff are:	very unfriendly	very friendly
Breakfast service is:	very slow	very quick
Room service availability is:	very limited	very good
Hotel early check out is:	very unhelpful	very helpful

This is not a perfect template for you to use but I hope you get the idea. To emphasise the point, you are trying to measure how satisfied customers are with your offer, based on their idea of priorities not yours.