WHAT IS WRONG WITH OUR HOTELS

When does a service issue become an outright problem instead of just a temporary inconvenience? What is the “tipping point” that provokes a guest to write a comment or, worse, never return to a property? And, most importantly, once you find this threshold, how do you ensure things never reach this point? The new-age verbiage for this process is “double deviation,” a term you’ve probably heard in passing, and yet, it’s one you should have in the back of your mind at all times. To draw upon my tourism background, customer complaints follow an initiation and propagation couplet. That is, a problem only becomes a problem when guests are not adequately compensated for the initial error, or when a second error occurs. I will use a recent trip to an island resort. My wife and I spent the weekend at a government owned luxury property. The first morning we chose to dine at the hotel’s uncrowded restaurant and were not impressed in the least. We waited a full 10 minutes for our simple order of a continental breakfast to be taken and another 20 for it to arrive — cold and with no apology forthcoming. Having a table near the kitchen, we could hear the staff chatting it up all throughout our half-hour hang-up. Unacceptable. We left without touching our food and complained to the front desk, then went off to a nearby warong for real food and activities. Returning that evening, we found a rather contrite note and a fruit basket in our room. Apology accepted. In our minds, the issue was fully resolved by the positive response from the staff. We chalked this up as a technical fault. It did not impede our travels, and we are not above thinking that there may have been other extenuating circumstances outside of the staff’s control. Then came the coup de grace. Housekeeping had cleaned the bathroom without leaving any towels. Not even a face towel! A minor grievance, negligible even, but it set off a flood of bad memories from that morning. Once was okay, but twice was utterly deplorable, no matter what the compensation. Needless to say, we agreed to never stay there again. When asked about our trip to, a foremost topic of discussion was always the horrible service at our hotel. This property not only lost a customer, but probably many other prospects as well.