“Global Research has introduced a system that has allowed us to collate our online feedback along with our written feedback and produce one meaningful report. The satisfaction report allows us to make strategic decisions on how we can continue to improve our guests’ experience. Since engaging Global Research’s services we have been able to listen to our guests in a timely manner and have importantly seen an improvement in our tripadvisor ranking.”
Background and aims
The Patterson and Ward families have a long history of dedication to guest satisfaction, including for over 50 years at Christchurch’s Commodore Hotel. In the last seven years their hotel ownership has expanded to include the Hotel Montreal (Christchurch) and the Queenstown Park Boutique Hotel. They have also branched out with Touchdown Car Rentals commencing in 2015.
The Patterson Hospitality Group (PHG) is the collective that binds these businesses, and Global Research has been privileged to partner with them for over 10 years to inform their guest satisfaction and other business decisions with ongoing and one-off pieces of research.
Our role
Global Research has worked in partnership with the PHG team in all the work we have completed. When working with a family that has hundreds of years of experience in their heads it makes sense to make the most of it. We take responsibility for making sure the methods are robust, the surveys are enjoyable for guests, and the reporting is insightful, engaging, and motivating for staff.
Design and method
Having taken the approach to work with each businesses individually for 10 years, this year we changed to leverage the opportunity that the multi-property ownership offers. We now assess and consider guest satisfaction as a collective, with a consistent surveying and reporting approach, enabling powerful comparisons to be made and learning opportunities to be shared across all businesses.
The survey design built on our previous work but also included the individual needs and wants of each property. The Hotels have a consistent survey distribution and promotion approach with the consistency enabling powerful comparisons to be made. The short survey asks guests to assess various aspects of their stay and also provides the time and space for them to write in their own words what they loved and what could be improved.
We still from time to time deliver individual pieces, driven by the gaps on business knowledge that sometimes appear as a result of the constantly changing environment that the businesses operate in.
Result
The resultant report features question-by-question, and hotel-by-hotel analysis of results. The upshot is that the Patterson Hospitality Group is able to see how each hotel compares to the others on separate metrics, and also how each hotel fares for each of the assessment criteria. It also makes it possible for insights learned from one business to be shared with the others. This information almost always confirms the Patterson Hospitality Group’s position as providers of the best quality customer service, and allows them to act quickly on the small number of cases where this isn’t so.
Outcome
The Patterson Group continues to use the results of guest satisfaction surveys to track each Hotel, to track trends as they emerge, and to reaffirm to their staff the high level of satisfaction that is traditionally reported. Evidence of their continued success is reported independently by ongoing high rankings on sites such as TripAdvisor.
We look forward to another ten years of working with the Patterson Hospitality Group.
Photo by Rhema Kallianpur on Unsplash
Check out some other projects we have completed for Patterson Hospitality Group:
Highly Ranked Christchurch Hotel Knows Its Guests ~ Commodore Airport Hotel
The Commodore Airport Hotel is one of Christchurch’s finest. The recent opening of its new wing and ongoing popularity are testament to it continually aspiring to be the best and achieving that aspiration.
Hotel management saw the need to refresh how it was measuring guest satisfaction with its facilities and services. Its aim was to find out from those who matter most, their guests: what is being done well; what can be improved; and to pick up ideas for doing things better. It also wanted to learn as much as possible from the comments offered by guests through social media, such as tripadvisor.
