Hotel Survey

It's always a good idea to try to design surveys that minimize survey respondent burden when you undertake a market research project.  But it is also very important to make sure your survey questions are clear and address one concept at a time.  Organizations may want to lump together multiple questions into a single measure to keep a questionnaire short, but this can sometimes confuse respondents and create unreliable results.  Take the following "double barreled" survey question example found in many restaurant questionnaires and hotel surveys:


While this may seem like a reasonable question that provides an overall rating of customers' experiences and feelings, it asks them to rate two separate aspects of the business (cleanliness and service) with one answer.  This approach to questionnaire design is definitely an online survey pitfall.  Respondents may not be able to honestly answer this question; they might feel that the place is very clean and neatly organized, but that the service is poor (or vice versa).  What answer can they choose that would accurately reflect such experiences/opinions?

By revising this double barreled question into two separate questions that each address a single concept, you can get a better sense of how customers feel about specific aspects of your business and services.  You will also produce results that are more valid and reliable than those based upon unclear or poorly designed survey questions.

Yesterday I was out to dinner with a friend, and we started talking about retail surveys. She was expressing her frustration with the survey questionnaire design for her company's retail surveys. Apparently, they always score low on this one question:

Most people don't come into her store looking for pants, so the sales associates don't harass customers asking if they need the fits explained. Makes sense. Then why is their online survey asking for customer feedback from all consumers regardless of their primary purpose in visiting the store?

Oh, wait! There's the problem. The survey writer neglected to ask survey respondents why they came to the store. Because of this omission, the survey question in question (Were pant fits explained?) isn't presenting very valuable survey data. The clear solution would be to add a new question and use some form of survey question logic (perhaps branch logic might be ideal here) to only ask those people who were shopping for pants if the pant fits were explained to them. Ideally, when you're testing your survey, you should think through the question flow and catch situations like these.

Another minor point about this question, what about those customers who were asked if they'd like the pant fits explained and declined? How are they going to answer this question to give you accurate data? Even if you would answer "Yes" because it was offered, not all online survey respondents will. This would be a more useful question, after being paired with a screener question, if it asked if a sales associated offered to explain the pant fits.

This same concept applies to hotel surveys, customer satisfaction research, website surveys, etc. The reason why a guest stays at a hotel (business or leisure travel) matters. What someone was looking for when they visited your website (trying to purchase X vs. looking for information about Y), makes a difference. If they are looking for information about Y it does not make sense to ask them if they found information on Z.

J.D. Power and Associates' latest hotel guest survey was released Tuesday with interesting results. Despite the down economy resulting in cutting of staff, services and amenities, guests say hotels are doing a better job meeting customer expectations and improving customer satisfaction. J.D. Power and Associates conducted an online survey with a survey respondent sample size of 66,000 guests who had stayed at a hotel between June 2008 and May 2009.

The online survey examined customer satisfaction across six hotel categories: luxury, upscale, midscale full service, midscale limited service, economy/budget and extended stay. To determine overall satisfaction the customer satisfaction survey methodology looked at seven measures:


Four of the six categories saw increased satisfaction over last year. The two categories not experiencing an increase, according to survey results, are luxury hotel where guest satisfaction remained stable and extended stay properties which a slight decrease.

Here are the Top 3 hotels in customer satisfaction for each category:

Luxury 1. Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts 2. The Ritz-Carlton 3. Fairmont Hotels & Resorts Upscale 1. Embassy Suites Hotels 2. Wyndham Hotels & Resorts 3. Omni Hotels Midscale Full Service 1. Hilton Garden Inn 2. Hyatt Place 3. Courtyard

Midscale Limited Service 1. Drury Inn & Suites 2. SpringHill Suites 3. Hampton Inn/Suites Economy/Budget 1. Microtel Inns & Suites 2. Red Roof Inn 3. Days Inn Extended Stay 1. Staybridge Suites 2. Homewood Suites 3. Residence Inn

I think it's important to note that the economy has hit hotels pretty hard. According to Smith Travel Research for the first six months of 2009 occupancy was down 11% over the first half 2008. Yet, hotels have done a good job improving guest customer satisfaction while simultaneously cutting costs.

To find out more about each segment's customer satisfaction ratings, you can check out the rest of the survey report on J.D. Power and Associate's website.

When was the last time you asked your hotel guests for customer feedback? Some hotels do an excellent job of sending out hotel surveys to gauge customer's satisfaction and experiences; others, well, I'm not sure they collect feedback from guests.

Just like it's important for a business to collect customer feedback by conducting customer market research and customer satisfaction surveys, it's important for hotels to build surveys for data collection as well. Travelers have lots of options, if you're constantly coming in below expectations and providing negative customer experiences, travelers will book rooms somewhere else.

If you have never done a hotel survey or don't already have a survey program in place, setting goals should be the first order of business. (I know, I'm so predictable, you knew that's what I would say.) Coming up with goals for your questionnaires can be one of the hardest parts if you've never done it before. While it's important to always create your own survey goals, here are a few things to think about for your hotel guest surveys:


Even if you're not gathering feedback about your guests visits, chances are other groups are. Every time I book a hotel through Expedia or another travel site, I receive a survey afterwards so they can ensure people booking through continue to be satisfied customers. The last thing you want is for your rating to go down because you didn't know there was a problem.