112 – Responding to Guest Satisfaction Surveys

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

In this episode of the Suite Spot Podcast, host and TMG Marketing Director, Ryan Embree and Chief Technology Officer, Jason Lee, tackle how guest satisfaction surveys impact a hotel’s operations and influence overall bookings. From topics such as what questions to ask in a guest satisfaction survey to how they shape your hotel’s bottom line, listeners will gain unique insights on implementing a system at their properties that extract more guest feedback. Suite Spot Podcast · 112 - Responding to Guest Satisfaction Surveys Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. Thank you all for listening or watching us today. Remember, we are in the content creation studio, AKA the digital den, here at Travel Media Group's headquarters just north of Orlando. We're super excited to be on YouTube now, and we've got a frequent guest. This is your second time on video, but you've been on the Suite Spot quite a number of times. Jason, Chief Technology Officer here at Travel Media Group. Jason, welcome back to the Suite Spot. Jason Lee: Yeah, thanks for having me again in the digital den. Ryan Embree: The digital den. Yes, we love to call it that. We've already talked about some exciting topics here in 2023. This one is a little polarizing, I'm sure for some of our listeners. If you, if you caught the title, so it's talking about responding to guest satisfaction surveys. We probably have heard that a lot from our brands, from our management companies, from a lot of people, from our guests. You've heard me talk a lot about responding to reviews. Obviously that's something at Travel Media Group we take a lot of pride in. We reached the incredible feat of responding to 1 million plus guest reviews last summer. Very exciting achievement. We had you on for an episode to talk about that. I'm curious, it's a different animal with these guest satisfaction surveys. Let's kind of talk about the differences between responding to guest reviews online and maybe guest satisfaction surveys. Jason Lee: Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest difference is that you've solicited this feedback. Online, what you're getting is someone has chosen to give you a public review and they're motivated by anger or motivated by happiness or whatever that motivation is. But in this case, you may have caught them in a space where they could give you objective information. So you've solicited that information and now they're filling that out. And so depending on your brand, it could be a lengthy survey, but typically it's done in stages so you can get some of that information out. But going back to your original question, I think the biggest difference in terms of tone is that you've solicited this feedback, now they've given you this feedback. Now what do you say back to them? And this isn't public. This is you with this guest, and you might know everything about this guest. You know who they are, you know what room they stayed in. You, you might have further, insight from your front desk or from other staff members who've maybe encountered this guest. So you have way more information than a public review where you might not know what room they were in. You might not know the guest, you might not know the situation. So now your response could be extremely specific. Ryan Embree: And you have to be careful with that response. I mean, some of the, the tips and best practices that we share for online reviews might not translate very well to an internal guest satisfaction survey. You know, where you're coming off as inauthentic.