What is guest feedback and hotel survey software?

If you are running a hotel today, there is only one thing that truly matters at the end of the day - that your guests are happy and would recommend you to their friends. Accepting that, you have a choice, either: (a) guess how you should operate using your gut feeling and manually figure out how every change affects your guest satisfaction or (b) automate asking your guests for feedback and let the data tell you how you’re doing and what you should improve. The latter, is what Guest Feedback Software is all about; asking for, responding to, sharing and analyzing feedback from your guests in order to improve and achieve higher guest satisfaction.

For info on guest feedback trends, questions that you should ask vendors and more download the 2019 Hoteliers Guide to Guest Feedback Software

How can guest feedback and hotel survey software improve profitability and efficiency?

Hotel survey software brings an unparalleled level of employee accountability. No matter to what extent your operation is automated, at the end of the day your guest experience is the sum of all the individual contributions of everyone working for your property. By automating the collection of feedback from real guests you get fair, reliable and constructive feedback to share and learn from. Using quantitative feedback you can set clear measurable goals for your employees to strive towards.

This level of accountability ultimately creates a culture of kaizen or continuous improvement at your hotel. A modern guest feedback platform lets you improve your hotel operation in two distinct ways: 1) Systematic collection of qualitative feedback help you collect and prioritize ideas straight from your guests. 2) Intelligent use of meta-data such as room number allow you to do A/ B-tests, for example performing experiments in a specific room and see how that affects satisfaction for guests in that specific room.

While ORM (online reputation management software deals directly with online reviews, your guest feedback and hotel survey software is your first line of defense. Feedback is everywhere no matter if you ask for it or not. When a guest is unsatisfied for some reason, actively and automatically asking for feedback gives you a chance to listen to the guest and solve the issue before the experience results in a bad public review, visible online for the world to read. Actively listening to your guests and showing a will to solve issues is the best possible way to turn a detractor into a promoter.

What are the most important features of guest feedback and hotel survey software?

Benchmarking: Benchmarking of your guest satisfaction using standardized key values will ensure you truly know how you are standing vs. your competitors. Providing a reference ensures you actually focus on the right issues.
Responsive Survey Design: The importance of mobile devices should be obvious and old news in the year 2018. Surveys that look and feel great on your guests mobile devices is simply a necessity to receive feedback today.
Import Meta-data from PMS: If a guest for example mentions that the shower head is broken, by knowing the room number the guest stayed in you can immediately fix the problem.
Guest Feedback Thread: If this is the 3rd time the guest stays at your hotel and 2nd time they provide feedback, a system that maintains this history about the guest will facilitate a lot more personal communication with the guest. (Beware to do this in compliance with the GDPR though!).
Response Management: Often guests will simply hit “reply” on the mail asking for feedback, rather than clicking the link and filling in a survey. Any vendor that sends surveys from a “dont-reply@vendor.com” will miss a lot of important feedback and booking requests.

What makes great guest feedback and hotel survey software?

Improves Net Promoter Score (NPS): Net Promoter Score is the gold standard for measuring customer loyalty/satisfaction. Commitment to an NPS-based system is guaranteed to increase your NPS. When asked for likelihood to recommend on scale 0-10: NPS = (% promoters) - (% detractors), Where promoter is anyone who have answered 10 or 9, detractor 6-0.
Improves online ratings: Your online reviews go hand-in-hand with how satisfied your guests actually are. Commitment to guest satisfaction and an NPSbased system will improve your online rating.
Direct RevPAR impact: Hotels with more satisfied guests will see a higher rate of returning guests, more guests arriving thanks to recommendations and more new guests thanks to good online reviews - all together improving your RevPAR.

What is the typical pricing for guest feedback and hotel survey software?

For a standard implementation with no special requirements or integrations to proprietary/in-house/legacy-systems there should be no implementation costs at all. Otherwise except IT-consultant hourly charges for custom integrations and hotels can expect up to $3,000 in implementation/integration fees off the bat.

With the broadening of scope of products in the category the pricing is getting more complex with a wide range between $50/$350/property per month. However, for a pure Guest Feedback & Reputation Management system for a single hotel, expect around $100/month.

For detailed pricing considerations and information, download the 2019 Hoteliers Guide to Guest Feedback Software

How long does it usually take for a hotel to implement new guest feedback and hotel survey software?

Implementation usually done in phases:

1) Start asking your guests for feedback by enabling PMS-integration (list of checked out guests + meta data transferred to feedback platform)

2) Initial staff training on how to actually respond to feedback

3) Management training on how to analyze feedback and set strategic goals A good feedback platform should be easy enough to use that staff training is not required to get started, but rather for learning/discovering “advanced features”.

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