Hotel Reviews of the Future
In a day and age where you can email everyone in your office a silly joke and receive the same one from your buddy Ted, who doesn't even work in the office, 15 minutes later, it is surprising that Hotel chains have not picked up on this lighting fast way of communicating with their customers more quickly.
Gone are the days of quickly jotting down your thoughts on a piece of paper and dropping it off at the front desk as you are running to catch a flight. Two major hotel chains (Marriott Hotels and Hilton Hotels) will no longer supply comment cards or mail out surveys to their guests. Rather, they will be using the power of the Internet to get in contact with their guests.
Marriott says it switched to e-mails because the majority of its frequent guests were Internet-savvy business travelers who wanted their voices heard more quickly. Visitors who send e-mailed comments get an automatic thank-you reply from Marriott and not a personal response that deals with their views. Marriott's Wolf said the hotel makes the customer service results available to general managers each week. The comments are loaded in the hotel's computer database within a day. Previously, it took as long as a week to enter the survey information because someone had to type the results in after they arrived by traditional mail.
Hilton managers, who perform regular, unannounced quality inspections of the company's properties twice a year, also use the e-mails to decide whether more visits are needed. "We can very quickly identify if we have a hotel that is delighting guests or hotels that aren't meeting guests' expectations and help fix the situation," Hartigan said.
Of course HotelsByCity.net has been using this method with our customers for years now. I guess we are just ahead of our time.
