The Future of the Voice of the Customer in Hospitality

For decades, the satisfaction survey has been one of the main pillars on which the Hospitality industry has sought to understand its guests. At the end of a stay, we would send an email with a link, wait for a few minutes of the guest’s time and, with any luck, receive a rating that would ultimately feed a dashboard with NPS, overall satisfaction or likelihood to recommend. It was standard practice and, for many years, it worked reasonably well.

However, customer behaviour has changed far more quickly than the tools we use to listen to it. Today, we operate in an environment where immediacy shapes every interaction. Guests book on their phones, make enquiries via WhatsApp, amend reservations through chat, share experiences on social media while they are still at the hotel and post a review shortly after leaving the property. In this new landscape, asking them to open an email hours later to complete a ten-question survey is starting to feel like a practice from another era.