Exciting news! Coyle has just completed our third major research piece about ‘Best Experiences’—this time with hotels. As many of you know, our ‘Best Experiences’ research centers around asking a lot of people where they had their best restaurant, hotel, and spa experience. We then ask the seemingly innocent question, “Why was it so good?”
This research is built on the premise that when guests have a ‘Best Experience’, it creates meaningful loyalty. Best Experiences are also the lifeblood of ‘word of mouth’ advertising. When people have a memorable experience (good or bad) they communicate prolifically within their socio-economic circle. They not only come back, they tell others.
As discussed last week in GuestIQ, we are often frustrated with surveys that pigeonhole respondents. The length of many surveys is troubling as well, creating fatigue leads to misleading answers. Our approach was to simply ask “Where was the great Experience?” and “Why was it so good?” We wanted a raw feed and we wanted the respondent’s fresh attention to the question.
Some of the 4705 ‘Best Hotel Experience’ respondents wrote more than 300 words and others wrote just a few sentences. However, all told us which hotel gave them a great experience, and what about that experience made it the best they had in the last year.
Our research team began the very hard work of reading all the surveys. (We literally read 4705 ‘short stories’ about wonderful hotels doing a wonderful job). We then created a proprietary scoring key that helped the researchers to categorize the narrative into primary key indicators (People, Product, Price) and then over 85 specific key indicators like Fast Check-In, Bedding, Privacy.
The responses were classified by segment and company, giving us fantastic insight into what creates raves in the likes of luxury, business class, and economy hotels, PLUS we learned the very specific and common features about what people love about certain hotel companies like Kimpton (Hint: It comes in a glass) and W Hotels (It comes in bottle).
Come back here next week to see the preliminary results of our ‘Hotel Best Experiences’ research.
To see our work on ‘Restaurant Best Experiences’ Click here.
