With the increase in product personalisation what were once products are now services, especially in the travel, tourism and hospitality industry.
This has implications on how review websites operate. If the customer really did ask for salt on their chips they can’t complain about the taste.
If the customer really did only give 30 minutes to cross from one side of the airport to another they can’t complain about missing their connection.
Of course a travel supplier must make an effort to stop a customer buying a combination that really isn’t practical – but ultimately the customer may choose not to take that advice and the supplier is left in a very difficult position of turning away business or accepting a booking that might result in the customer having a poor experience.
Then we have the problem of expectation. Much of what ends up as a negative review is because the customer expected a different level of service than what they purchased.
We constantly see negative coverage about low cost airlines such as Ryanair but really they are very good services at the price. In the UK some train journeys cost more!
Many expectation issues are actually cultural. Book a double bed in Germany and find out that it is more like a twin bed pushed together? Well that is how it is in Germany and not cause for a negative review, for example.
A proposed solution
The real problem with negative reviews is that the customer really did have a negative experience. Therefore the aim of a hotelier or other supplier shouldn’t be in stopping negative reviews but stopping negative experiences in the first instance. Cure the cause not the symptom.
For example do customers know how German hotel beds are likely to be? *
The period between booking and pre-travel is normally used to sell more stuff to the customer. Sell them airport parking, sell them insurance, sell them an upgrade to something or other.
Instead, I propose that you use this time to start to set expectation. Start a conversation with the customer.
For example lets assume they are going to Germany. Show them two pictures of hotel beds side by side – one based on their cultural norm, one based on the German reality. Â Ask them which best matches what they have booked. Let them answer a series of five photo-based questions and if they have them all right then that is fine.
However if the customer scores most of them wrong then you know they are expecting something different to what you have sold them.
At this point you can get a human on the case and contact the customer to recalibrate their expectation (or sell them an upgrade that matches what they actually want).
Now that would be better than just having reviews AFTER travel, right?
At least the supplier can remove a cause of negative experiences while they still have the chance. Much better.
Such a strategy would also position review websites as being useful to suppliers rather than just as scorers of historical customer experiences that the supplier can’t actually do anything about.
NB: * Walking in Germany make a good attempt to show what a German bed looks like – see picture.
About Alex Bainbridge
I agree with much of what you’re saying here. I had an interesting conversation with a B&B owner in Bath along the same lines. His place was in the top two on Tripadvisor, and he reckons he gets better reviews than his rivals because his prices are slightly lower (people will always give more slack if the price is lower) and that he manages expectations by giving a clear overview of what to expect.
The whole beds in Germany thing, however, is very interesting. As far as I can tell, it’s a bit of a myth that Germans prefer their beds like this. And certainly not all hotels have the two singles pushed together = double policy.
I’ve recently come back from inspecting hotels in Germany, and found that – by and large – the better ones (not necessarily upmarket, just best for their price bracket) have proper queen and king beds. Some hotels have a mixture of both to cater for all tastes. Some just have the two singles = double and don’t have any proper beds.
I asked one hotelier about the bed thing, and she argued that the hotels that had the ‘German’-style beds were just being lazy. After all, there’s an argument to say that if you’ve got an English-language website and you’re selling via global booking sites, your beds should either be of the type that English-speakers would deem a ‘double’ or there should be a clear explanation of what that hotel deems a double. And as I say, it’d be a mistake to call it a ‘German’ double – it’s merely what some hotels in Germany like to get away with as a double.
Yes, it’s partly about managing expectation. But sometimes it’s also about raising standards to meet the expectations of your customers. And I’d argue that any German hotel actively targeting overseas customers should have the sort of bed that overseas customers would expect to see in a a reasonably expensive hotel.
The subjectivity of individual expectations will always be hard to manage, like the interplay of circumstances and experience.
Travel is a state of mind and the more we standardize the world the less reason there is to travel and meet people. If people understood more about culture, traditions (in german beds!?) and the fact that we’re all different then maybe they’d start to see the glass half full rather than half empty.
Maybe we need to focus on the privilege of travel (ryanair) and help people to see why they’re luck to be experienceing the problem in the first place.
That said, standards should be high as national pride is at stake. Take the Germany hotel bed for example, it’s tarnishing the nations hotels rather than being a cultural quirk!
Just some thoughts that sprung to mind when I read this.
This was exactly the point I made in my review of the Grange Hotel in York. All the hype about it being in the Sunday Times Top 100 Global Hotels and the website which focused on the four poster rooms led to disappointment:
http://www.europealacarte.co.uk/blog/2010/02/11/review-grange-hotel-york/
I just had quick look at the Grange Hotel site and it would appear they’ve chosen to ignore my advice.
Barry Schwartz gave a very interesting TED talk about The Paradox of Choice, which touched upon the the expectations of customers based upon the amount of choice that they had.
With so much choice in the travel industry there can only be a high expectation that what consumers eventually choose will make them happy.
When their expectations exceed the potential benefits gained from having so much choice it gives a negative impact on their experience, even if they didn’t have a poor experience.
It’s easy to imagine that there could have been a different choice that could have been better.
Of course, ideally, it would be better to address those expectations before or during booking instead of afterwards. But how do you know what those expectations are before getting bad reviews?
I’m sure there are many more things that people expect than a concept of double beds. So where should the line be drawn?
It might become stifling and almost certainly more time consuming to address all of the potential expectation pitfalls of each option and have an adverse effect on the experience of the point of sale.
This is another interesting point raised by Barry Schwartz in his talk. That too many choices or points of consideration (despite assuming that we are happier with an increased freedom of choice) can paralyse decision making.
Participation decreases when the number of choices increases.
To make the process of deciding on travel more informative (complex) increases the risk that potential customers won’t make a choice at all.
Not only that, but if they do make a choice they could quite easily book something else or through someone else that they think satisfies their pre-conceived ideas on what to expect, rather than an open overview (designed to reduce bad reviews).
Is it also viable to say that standards need to be raised to meet those expectations?
From a tour operator/supplier point of view, I don’t think they would have that much control over the standards of their carriers and accommodations – except to the point of deciding which to promote.
Surely, most carrier and accommodation providers will already take their reviews into consideration and will have worked out what they can and cannot feasibly increase the standards of, within the price range of the market that they are targeting, and must then turn to how they market themselves.
The information has to be carefully crafted, as to not overwhelm or repel customers with candid openness, and concise and inviting enough to attract sales, without creating cause for a bad review.
Thanks for all the great comments.
Actually yeah as Karen points out, I think that was a bit of a given that expectations play a significant part to subsequent negative reviews. I have written about it in the past too (But not on Tnooz)
My real point was that taking that hypothesis as correct, what would help suppliers (hence review websites) address expectation prior to travel. My functionality idea that a website could use to interrogate a customer might work…. I am sure there are others!
This is a really useful article and I love the German beds example.
Another example of poorly-managed expectations is when hotels insist on self-certifying themselves as “5-star” or “luxury” when they are clearly not. All they are doing is setting themselves up for bad reviews and misleading customers. This is unfortunately all too common in London for example where even the most mediocre hotels will use the prefix “luxury”.
On the other hand, hotels which underplay expectations like the Dean Street Townhouse (it describes some of its rooms as “broom cupboards”) are all too rare and in my view will steal market share:
http://londonhotelsinsight.com/2010/04/02/a-london-hotel-which-%E2%80%9Clowballs%E2%80%9D-and-overdelivers/
If you read TripAdvisor reviews for London hotels, you’ll see how common the problem of “the room was smaller than I thought” is, even in otherwise excellent hotels. It would be great if hoteliers could be more upfront about this aspect in the way you describe.
I am intrigued by interacting with the guest to insure their expectations are a match for the experience they will have here. Now, I’d be delighted if Alex could just write another blog about how to get guests to even open the confirmation emails or the emails that specifically state in the subject line that we ‘have a question about your reservation’.
We definitely do want the guest to have the best possible experience given all of the choices available. I just don’t see anyone taking a ‘pop quiz’ so I can manage those expectations!
We do the best we can with photos on the website, info in the confirmation email and chats on the phone. And yet we still hear, ‘What, there’s no elevator?!’ when guests arrive at our home-based B&B. Also startling to the guest is that a New England home has more than one floor. (Yes, tons of outside photos of the building on the website!)
It’s a 2-way street. As mentioned in the example about booking connecting flights with no lead time between- part of the responsibility is on the shoulders of the guests to ask the right questions based on their needs.
People may have different reasons for having a vacation; wanting to escape from a traumatic experience through a new environment, a break from work, or simply to enjoy. Whatever the reason is, one of the best destinations is the United Kingdom.
Where is the possibilities to describe and write bad customers behaviour ??? Thefts, dirtyness, lack of care, bas language, lie, crooks, dishonest ???? Why every catre go to travellers and not to hotel who do there best to wellcome desagrable and deshonest peoples???
To use an analogy, if I sell some second-hand item on ebay, I show a few photos if needed, and describe the good things about it, but I also point out anything that is wrong with it, such as a dishwasher that works perfectly except for a very slow leak. I have never had a complaint in five years of selling on ebay.
So where do you draw the line, as Barry asks, when wondering what negative points to describe? I think you need to put yourself in the shoes of the paying guest, and ask yourself what you would be disappointed with, relative to the price that you have paid.
A great article on expectations,hence we hired a photographer in to take photo,s of our rooms,they are clearer and you can see the rooms and types of beds we provide.
It is better to get it right and pay a little more for photo,s or any job,article.since then the bookings have gone up ok only about 3 percent but we dont get questions “what type of beds do you have?” What colour are the rooms?Might sound silly but due to less phone calls,writting e mails this takes on average 20 t0 30 minutes a month of our time hence the NEW PICS saves time so we can spend more time with our GUEST’S.