4 Quick Tips For Better In-Stay Surveys

Service recovery is an important part of managing the guest experience. Let’s face it, no matter how hard you try, you can’t please everyone. Despite your best efforts, something might go wrong during a guest’s stay. The best way to turn that guest’s experience around, and prevent a negative review for your hotel, is through an in-stay survey.

In-stay surveys allow you to gauge how your guest’s stay is going while you still have the ability to improve it. Beyond being good for your hotel’s reputation, it means you can delight your guests and create wonderful memories for them — something that all hoteliers love to do. But what’s the best way to structure your in-stay surveys to get the most value out of them? Revinate’s experts identified four ways you can make the most of your in-stay surveys. 

1. Keep The Survey Short

You want to check in with your guest, not take time away from their vacation or business trip, so try to keep the survey short. Keeping it short will also boost the completion rate of the survey. Aim for between one and three questions.

2. Ask Whether Anything Has Gone Wrong

You might be inclined to simply ask the guest to rate their stay, but while this is valuable information, it won’t tell you the whole story. If someone rates their stay poorly, and you’ve not asked for additional information, you’ll be left with no information on how to resolve it. Instead, be sure to include a question on whether anything has gone wrong so that you can recover from an issue you would otherwise never have known existed.

3. Give the Guest Room to Speak

Always include an open-ended question where guests can leave comments. Guests don’t need to fill it out if they feel it’s unnecessary, but it will allow you to collect any miscellaneous feedback that might not have been captured in the above questions. More to the point, people like to be heard and this gives them the opportunity to do just that.

4. Act on the Feeback Right Away

This isn’t really a tip about creating surveys, but it’s just as important as the other tips. Make sure that if you’re asking for feedback, you act on it right away. Service recovery can be powerful, but it can also backfire. If you don’t respond in a timely manner, the opportunity to recover from the service failure be lost, but you may be making the guest’s experience even worse. Now, not only did they experience something negative during their stay, they were also ignored by hotel staff. 

When we put these tips together, we get an in-stay survey that looks a lot like this one:

In-stay survey example

If you want to know more about in-stay surveys and how to create them, we’ve created a helpful article to walk you through the process. If you don’t currently have in-stay surveys and are interested in seeing how Revinate can help you delight your guests, get a demo today.