Author Archives: TrueGuest

About TrueGuest

Headquartered in Los Angeles, TrueGuest was created by former hotel executives to serve the hospitality industry by measuring and improving guest service and internal controls. Our Service Experience Audits are used by top brands such as Ritz-Carlton, St. Regis, Marriott, Renaissance, Hilton, Hyatt, W Hotels, Intercontinental, Sheraton, Radisson, Holiday Inn, Wyndham, and many more.

This Bedbug Registry Will Make You Itch

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The USA Today posted a good article on the rising incidents of bedbugs in the US.  You can check out the full article here.  The article links to a website, bedbugregistry.com, where over 20,000 travelers have posted their stories of their bedbug encounters.  The database has hotels from shady roadside inns… to some of the top hotels in the country.

We took a look at the hotels in Southern California and were surprised to see many top brands on the list… and many with multiple reports.  Bedbugs are a fact of life in the hotel industry.  Just like any other complaint, handling the problem properly will usually keep you away from this type of bad publicity.

Hilton to close California call center, cut 300 jobs according to USA Today

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USA Today’s travel blog ‘Hotel Check-in’ is reporting that Hilton is going to be closing the reservation call center in Hemet, California and moving the call center to the Philippines.  Unfortunately, over 300 jobs will be eliminated in Hemet.  From the USA Today article:

“Hilton previously closed call centers in Illinois in 2008 and Pennsylvania last year, according to the Press-Enterprise. Some of the Pennsylvania workers had said they, too, went to the Philippines to train call-center workers, the paper says.

Hilton will offer employees positions at Hilton’s call centers in Carrollton, Texas, and Tampa, Fla., where workers make roughly $9 an hour, the story says. Those who don’t take the jobs will be offered severance packages.

Further details about the layoff aren’t available, because the employees told the paper that Hilton ordered them not to talk to the media – or, if they did, they’d lose their severance pay.”

Be sure to check out the full article by hitting the link above.  Warning:  there are a few hundred posts from very angry American’s following the article.  Here is a follow up article regarding the reader’s comments.

USA Today: Hotel Guests More Satisfied During Downturn According to J.D. Power

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According to the Hotel Check-in section of USA Today, guests are more satisfied with hotels during the downturn.  You can read the entire article and some pretty insightful comments here.  From the article:

“Hotel guests have generally been happier with their hotel experience in the past 12 months vs. the prior year as room rates dropped and crowds thinned, according to J.D. Power and Assoc.’s latest study that measures how well hotel chains satisfy their customers.”

The reasons for increased satisfaction according to the article:

“The travel downturn: With fewer people on the road, people who did travel found emptier hotels, which meant they encountered less competition for the treadmill in the fitness center, or less of a chance to stand in line at a busy convention hotel.”

“Cost: Hotel rates fell in the last 12 months, and customers generally felt more satisfied with what they received for their money.”

“Hotels operations: Hotels genuinely got better at pleasing their customers in the past year due to stiff competition for guests. “All of them are focused on improving guest satisfaction,” Schwartz says. Almost all of the chains increased their scores on a year-over-year basis – and not a single hotel chain saw its score drop significantly, he says.”

Our take:  It is somewhat surprising to see increased satisfaction as we are all battling with being understaffed.  Most hotels that we talk with have similar or higher occupancy but have much lower staffing levels because the ADRs are so low.  We believe that much of it comes down to cost.  Many guests are more satisfied simply because the rooms cost less and there is much more perceived value.

The Ultimate Arrival Experience in Action

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If you are working hard on improving your guest welcome with our Guide to the Ultimate Arrival Experience, we wanted to share a few stories of the Ultimate Arrival Experience in action.  The great thing about these two stories is how they show how our Ultimate Arrival Experience will work for any hotel.  These two hotels were both visited by one of our mystery shoppers during the same week…  both took a similar approach to the arrival experience… but are very different hotels.  The first hotel was a budget-friendly Holiday Inn, the second was an ultra-luxurious Ritz-Carlton.

Continue reading →

Hospitality Jobs are the 7th Worst Jobs for Workers with College Degrees, According to Yahoo Jobs

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Yahoo Jobs released their 10 lowest-paying jobs for workers with college degrees.  The study, found here, compares the salaries of workers in the middle of their careers.  Hospitality and tourism jobs have a starting salary of $37,000 and a mid-career salary of $54,300.  The worst paying jobs on the list also include drama, fine arts, education, horticulture, Spanish, music, theology, elementary education, and social work.

Consumer Reports Rates Hotels, Results May Surprise You

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In the June 2010 issue of Consumer Reports, they have a special travel section that tells readers how to get great deals on travel.  They also announce their ratings for the year.  The hotel ratings, based on over 27,000 reader’s surveys, are somewhat surprising.  Consumer Reports has odd categories of hotels such as ‘fanciest’, ‘luxury’, and ‘upscale’.  The ‘upscale’ category for instance has both full-service and limited-service hotels.

The top score was a tie between Ritz-Carlton in the ‘fanciest’ category and Homewood Suites in the ‘upscale’ category.  The Homewood Suites scored an excellent in value and the Ritz scored very good.

Here are the rankings for a couple of the categories:

Continue reading →

How Google’s Real-Time Search Can Help You Save Customers

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We have posted a few articles on how to successfully maintain your internet reputation.  If you missed them, start by reading this one.  Maintaining your hotel’s internet reputation is one of the most important things you can do to save customers who had a bad experience and capture new customers. 

Google has now started to do ‘Real-Time Searches’.  What does that mean?  Google says real-time search is:

“… new features that bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.”

What does that mean to you?  Well, for starters, your hotel will now appear in Google if people post a tweet on Twitter about you or mention you in their Facebook status update.  This can be either really good for you, or really bad for you.  Here is how I first noticed Google’s real-time search.  I was going to go out to a local restaurant and needed the address so I did what I always do… pulled out the iPhone and googled it.  I found the address on the first Google entry.  I happened to scroll down to the bottom of the page and saw someone’s Twitter tweet that said ‘got food poisoning at XYZ Restaurant’. 

Obviously not good for business.  I know that I found another restaurant to eat at.  I am sure that many others did as well.  So, what should you do?  First, have a good plan in place to monitor your hotel’s internet reputation.  Then act on anything both positive and negative that you may see.  It is very easy to contact someone who posts about your hotel on Twitter or Facebook or in their Blog.  Be sure to send them a thank you if they say something positive about you and make sure that you offer to fix any problems they may have had if they say anything negative about you.  Make sure that you have a plan in place today!

USA Today reports ‘Hard Times Send Hotel Industry into Survival Mode’

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A really good article from USA Today about hotels struggling to survive.  Check out the full article on USA Today’s website.

The article features some high-profile hotel closures such as the W Hotel in San Diego and the Ritz-Carlton in Las Vegas.  The article also mentions how 76 California hotels have already fallen into foreclosure and that 330 out of the states 10,000 hotels have defaulted on their mortgage payments in the last year.

As far as the cuts, the article really only mentions that Concierges are being replaced by lower-cost employees and some hotels are changing their approach to food and beverage.

We have noticed quite a few changes at hotels over the last year or so to cut costs or drive revenues.  A few of the changes we see:

  • Many hotels have closed restaurants and bars.  Instead of having 2 or 3, many have closed all but one restaurant and one bar.
  • Hotels have cut costs and gone green by eliminating newspapers and printed folios.
  • Parking rates are on the rise.  Many hotels have increased the parking fees for both self-parking and valet parking.
  • Breakfast buffets have really been changing.  The prices have increased and the quality and selection of food have decreased.
  • Overall staffing has really decreased.  Many hotels have eliminated positions like bellmen or concierges.  Also, we see longer lines at check-in because the hotels have fewer GSAs with similar occupancy as in the past.

What are you doing to survive?  Please post in our comment section!

USA Today Reports that Cybercriminals Still Consider Hotels Easy Targets for Credit Card Info

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There is a great article in the USA today on how criminals target hotels and steal their guest’s credit card info.  You can read the entire article on the USA Today website by clicking here.

The article says that hotels are considered hacker’s number one target and mentions how Wyndham was breached 3 times in the last 12 months.

Our favorite post from the comment section:  Ladies Man writes “A bigger and far more serious crime is coming down to breakfast and discovering it consists of bagels, honey buns, and those weird chewy off-brand fruit bars. If my credit card info must be stolen, I’d rather find out after I’ve had a large and proper breakfast.”

Great Comment Card Scores Through Bribery

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We found a good laugh.  In the ‘Goofs, Glitches, Gotchas’ section of the newest Consumer Reports, a reader sent in a hotel’s attempt to bribe them to be happy.  The hotel included the following message on their folio:

“For every guest that rates their stay as VERY SATISFIED, we will issue 20,000 points to your priority club card”

The reader asked the manager who said that his intent was to thank people for completing the survey.  Consumer reports adds ‘but not, it seems, for completing it honestly.’

What are you doing to bribe your guests?