Hotel Valentine is a fictional, medium-sized hotel that caters predominantly to business travellers. Even if they are not the luxurious type, they are known for delivering reliable and consistent service. The hotel has a restaurant, a bar and a gym that is open 24h for all guests. Their facilities are modern and the personnel are attentive.
John Pearson is the newly appointed General Manager at Hotel Valentine. He is known for his ambition and experience in the hospitality sector. John wants to show the hotel owners that even if the hotel seems to be performing relatively well in general, there might still be something he can do to boost guest satisfaction and loyalty even further. As experienced in the industry as he is, he decides that he will need to identify which are the parts of the guest experience at the hotel that generate the most loyal and disloyal guests. Based on this information he will be able to prioritize these areas by allocating resources and action plans to them first.
To identify the importance of different parts of the guest experience, John will use correlation, a statistical measure that indicates the extent to which two or more variables fluctuate together and which measures the degree to which changes to one value predict change to the value of another. When John explains to his team the benefits of working with correlation he often does it by translating it to a powerful question: Which areas are the most important areas to improve in my hotel in order to increase overall guest loyalty the most?
Valentine Hotel has sent out surveys for over a year now where guests are asked about both their willingness to recommend the hotel to a friend or colleague, as well as about their satisfaction regarding specific areas in the hotel such as the breakfast, restaurant or reception. With this information at hand, it is easy for John to calculate the correlation between the likeliness to recommend the hotel and the guest satisfaction on every single area measured in the survey.
John soon discovers that breakfast is the area with the highest correlation with guests’ willingness to recommend the hotel. This means that a change in the overall breakfast satisfaction would result in the greatest impact on guests' likelihood to recommend Hotel Valentine to others. By knowing that the breakfast is decisive for guests recommending the hotel or not, John can invest his time at closely looking into what present and past guests think about it. Where is there room for improvement? How can he make the experience even better based on the guests' comments? These changes could be as simple as offering gluten free bread or extending the breakfast opening times one hour more; or simply by encouraging the personnel to smile when greeting every single guest.
Within just two months after having executed the changes, John is able to please the hotel owners with clear results: a higher overall satisfation measured through the guests' willingness to recommend and a higher score in both service and breakfast areas. John has managed to significantly boost guest satisfaction & loyalty during his first six months at the hotel by efficiently allocating his resources and by prioritizing the right areas and action plans!
How can hotels benefit from correlation data?
- To identify which areas are most important for guests.
- To effectively allocate resources & action plans to where it matters for the guests.
- To empower teams by showing them how much they matter when it comes to creating happy and returning guests.
People are different, and so are hotels; Every hotel has specific parameters that are viewed as more or less important by their guests. In other words, different hotels rely on different areas that trigger positive and negative recommendations, and so discovering which these are is crucial to improving guest satisfaction. When using Loopon you get access to a so-called Correlation Report so that you can easily uncover the areas in which your efforts will result in more and greater differences.
