The Underlying Power of Using Correlation in Hotels
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, who is known for his ambition and experience in the hospitality sector. John wants to show to the hotel owners that even if the hotel seems to be performing relatively well in all areas, 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 figure out the areas that create the most loyal and disloyal guests. Then he will be able to prioritize these areas by allocating his resources to them first and make his team aware of how important they are for creating happy guests. When John has looked for these areas in the past hotels he has worked in he has used 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.
Valentine Hotel has sent out surveys for over a year now that ask guests about both the 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, the restaurant or the reception. Therefore, it is easy for John to calculate the correlation between the likeliness to recommend and the satisfaction regarding every single area based on what guests have responded. When he has to explain to his team the benefits of searching for 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 guest loyalty the most?
John soon discovers that satisfaction regarding the breakfast has the highest correlation with guests’ willingness to recommend. This means that guests that rate the breakfast experience as a very pleasant one are also most likely to recommend Hotel Valentine to others. And the same is applicable the other way around, those that do not like the breakfast at all, also happen to be very unlikely to recommend Hotel Valentine to friends and colleagues. By knowing that the breakfast is decisive for guests recommending 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? What did guests that were not willing to recommend the hotel comment about the breakfast? How can he make the experience even better based on the satisfied guests’ comments? These changes could be as simple as offering gluten free bread or extending the breakfast time one hour more; or a bit more complicated such as 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 is about to become the first General Manager in Hotel Valentine’s history that succeeds in boosting guest satisfaction & loyalty during his first six months at the hotel by efficiently allocating resources and focus areas!
How can hotels benefit from correlation data?
- To get to know those areas that are most important for guests.
- To effectively allocate resources such as time and money.
- To empower teams by showing them how much they matter when it comes to creating happy and returning guests.
- To find the reasons behind drops in guest satisfaction and to uncover potential areas that are not being taken as seriously but guests do consider very important.
People are different, and so are hotels; Every hotel has specific parameters that are viewed as more important by their guests. In other words, different hotels rely on different areas that trigger both 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 keep track of it and uncover the areas in which your efforts will result in more and greater differences.
Learn more at www.loopon.com or email us at support@loopon.com to get more information. We will be glad to help!
