When I stay with Hyatt, I regularly receive a survey after I’ve checked out. I rarely do with Marriott. I’ve just learned why: Marriott won’t send a survey to a guest that’s completed one within the past 60 days.
- This means guest satisfaction scores are disproportionately based on infrequent, lower-value guests. Hotel revenue is tied in several ways to guest satisfaction scores, for instance whether they’re allowed to charge resort fees is contingent on these scores.
- As I understand it, you can’t post a review of a property on the Marriott website unless you’ve completed a survey on that property. So reviews will also disproportionately skew towards infrequent guests.
An Ambassador member with a stay a week and spending over $23,000 might receive a survey once every 8 stays at most, though probably slightly less often. Meanwhile someone staying 6 times a year spread out evenly across the year will receive a survey on 90 of their stays, and able to review 90% of their stays. As a result hotels are incentivized to operate with the infrequent guest in mind.
This is one area where IHG is the industry leader. As an IHG Diamond and Ambassador, I get a survey from IHG after every stay at every IHG brand. You can also go on the IHG website, access past stays and then post a review directly on the IHG website. You can’t do that with Marriott or Hyatt to the best of my knowledge.
If any of you think the surveys actually matter (outside of some small percentage of management bonus tied to getting higher than an x rating) you are sadly mistaken.
I always just delete the many survey requests I get. Just like tipping, surveys have seemingly spread to most of the transactions I make and I refuse to waste my time on them
Marriott once again showing that their true customers are hotel operators. Blocking customers from the ability to post positive and negative reveiws after each and every stay.
I had over 150 stays last year as an Ambassador member.
I guess the truth hurts….
Anyway, I go to TripAdvisor to post hotel reviews anyway
Actually, these surveys do matter. Marriott, for example, awards its best property awards based on its surveys. Properties that continue getting low scores get audited. Properties also are monitored on response time to negative comments, etc.
Perhaps Marriott considers your repeat engagement a 10/10 endorsement?
I’m with @Greg. If you’re coming back you must enjoy the Bonvoy life.
Bonvoy, AA, Hertz, Ubereats … the four horsemen of the domestic travel apocalypse.
INCORRECT CONCLUSION BY GARY LEFF WHO IS NOT A QUANTITATIVE METHODOLOGIST
I am a quantitative methodologist in the social sciences. PhD, for what it’s worth, although one certainly does not need that degree to see the error in the thesis of this article.
A person who has not filled out a survey in the last 60d is not the same as a person who is an infrequent guest. Frequent guests tend to be very busy people who don’t have the time for surveys, except every once in a while. Frequent guests are sent a lot of surveys and fill one out on rare occasion.
The reason to exclude past 60d survey respondents is, if you’re polling the same person over and over, you’re not really assessing the property’s quality of service. You’re assessing the person’s response style. Some people will give high marks to all properties no matter how good or bad the service really was. Conversely, others will give low marks even to Savoy trained butlers.
@Dignity I understand the upside of what they’re doing but they’re still undersampling most frequent guests
RED HERRINGS BY DIGNITY WHO IS NOT A TRAINED LOGICIAN
Let’s address your flaws in logic here: first, you assume that Gary is not a quantitative methodologist. Where is your proof of this? Second, you appear to assume without proof both that frequent guests are busier than infrequent guests and that how busy one is correlates to how likely they are to fill out a survey. Third, you make the absurd claim that polling the same person repeatedly somehow gives less information on which to assess a property than only polling that person once. This might be true if it were a zero sum game, i.e. there were a finite number of surveys, but it is ridiculous to conclude that surveying me 100 times and 100 other people once each is somehow less valuable than surveying me once and 100 other people once each. In fact, my multiple survey perspective is probably particularly valuable because I am more familiar with the property, more invested in seeing the property improve because I’m a regular, and in a better position to make repeated comparisons between stays and between different properties than the more infrequent traveler.
Is this a typo?:
“ Meanwhile someone staying 6 times a year spread out evenly across the year will receive a survey on 90 of their stays, and able to review 90% of their stays.” I do not understand “…on 90 of their stays…”. If only staying 6 times/year, they would require 15 years to accumulate 90 stays, right?
My pea brain sees this as an upside. Frequent guests are that because they like the product. Sampling every 60 days levels the playing field, making the infrequent traveler’s opinion count the same as frequent travelers. Otherwise, scores would be biased to business travelers and not account for regular folk, leisure travelers, students, etc… It seems Marriott’s way of sampling might give the best overall picture.
Here’s the question that no one is asking. Does it really matter how many times a guest is surveyed post stay when response rates across the board are very, very low? The assumption always seems to be that everyone is surveyed, they’re obviously not, and that when they are, that survey is getting filled out when in fact it’s very much not.
Sure, if a property has gone rogue and is really doing things the wrong way and enough noise is created over a long period of time, surveys could help make a change at that property by making the parent company aware.
But, if I’m a GM or if I’m a regional manager/VP that oversees multiple properties for a franchisee, do I really care put a lot of weight in surveys when 95+% of the ones that go out are never done? I’ll give you a hint, no.
In addition to this, they don’t limit only to respondents. You only get one *request” in any 60 day (really 120 or +/-60) window. I rarely feel compelled to leave a review as most hotels are average-ish. Where I do feel compelled is on the outliers. Now, I have a decision to make… Do I bother reviewing an average hotel (no) or a great hotel (no)? Why? Because leaving those reviews resets the 60 day clock too. I’ll save it when I have something corrective to say.
If they’d remove the clock, I’d love to leave more positive reviews of good staff and take a bit more time here and there to review average properties.
When guests receive too many surveys they will not fill them out. Marriott is doing it correctly. If you feel the need to review every property go on Tripasvisor