Feedback On How Hotels Request Feedback

By: Ben Schlappig

Updated: June 9, 2022
Published: May 14, 2019

36 comments

I just received an email from a hotel that I think perfectly sums up just about everything that I perceive hotels to do wrong when it comes to soliciting feedback. My point isn’t to pick on this email specifically (I won’t even mention the name of the hotel), but rather I think this is so reflective of how hotels belonging to the big chains collect feedback.

It’s understandable that hotels want to do everything they can to make sure you had a nice stay. One of the main reasons they care about this is because they don’t want you to leave a bad review on TripAdvisor, and they also want you to fill out the post-stay survey you get in a positive way.

At the moment I’m staying at an average Marriott-family property in the US. It’s a four star property and there’s nothing great or terrible about it, in my opinion.

So last night I received the following email, prior to my check-out this morning:

Thank you for choosing the [hotel name]. We have you departing tomorrow and would the opportunity to know if we have exceeded your expectations throughout your stay.if there is anything we could have done differently to make your stay more enjoyable, please let us know prior to your departure by contacting me directly or by emailing .Our primary goal is for you to able to positively recommended us to your family and friends. Safe travels to your next destination,and i hope to be able to serve you again in the future.

Specific to this email:

I imagine this email is being copied and pasted and sent to a lot of people, so could someone not proofread it before sending it?
This was sent to me from a Gmail address, rather than a Marriott email address

More big picture:

Maybe this is reflective of our culture on the whole, where anything other than a “10” is a failing grade, but why is the standard exceeding expectations? No, my expectations haven’t been exceeded, so does that mean I should be telling them? I don’t have any problems either, though.
I’m all for hotels soliciting feedback, but I consistently find that they send this email right before check-out. I’d love to see more hotels send this email to people either right before they check-in, or shortly after they check-in, which seems much more genuine to me. “If there’s anything that doesn’t meet your expectations or that we can do to improve, don’t hesitate to reach out” sounds much better to me.

Bottom line

Hotels being hyper-sensitive to feedback is a blessing and a curse. I appreciate that they’re interested in making things right to keep it off the internet, but I also wish they’d be more realistic about the feedback expectations they have, and would do it in a more genuine way.

Can’t the standard be meeting expectations, rather than exceeding them? Personally I’d also love to see hotels send emails like this at the beginning of a stay rather than at the end. Then it would actually seem like they wanted to ensure a good experience, rather than just ensure good reviews online.

This is all incredibly minor, of course, but here at OMAAT we often talk about the (very little) details of travel, and this is one area where I find hotels to consistently take the wrong approach.

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Pete Guest

May 16, 2019, 2:37 am

That email is clearly NOT from Marriott, Ben. Block the address and delete it.

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Charlie McMillan Gold

May 15, 2019, 4:58 am

Hotels need to understand: 1. Customers can tell if your response to criticism is a cut and paste generic one (“please rest assured that I have notified the relevant teams....”). Stop doing that. You haven’t notified anyone and we know that. 2. Please don’t respond to criticism with a rebuttal. Work the problem and tell the guest specifically how you could fix it next time. 3. A happy guest doesn’t need to give you a perfect 10. What happened to “the best surprise is no surprise?” If I get a decent room that’s clean and comfortable with seamless check in/out then you’ve done your job. I don’t need to heap over-the-top praise on your “team members” to express this. 4. Stop telling us “guest satisfaction is our number 1 priority.” It isn’t. High occupancy and shareholder profit is your number 1 priority, as it should be. Happy guests are just a means to that end. 5. If you ask for direct feedback by email, an actual response might be nice if the guest takes you up on that. And never use that to ask the guest to take down a negative review. Hoteliers, I hope this helps you understand where we’re coming from a bit better!

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John Guest

May 15, 2019, 4:41 am

During the last northern summer I spend 3 months in Europe and stayed at about 20 different hotels all booked through hotels.com. While a few of the hotel reminded me about reviewing them the main problem was that after every stay I got an email from hotels.com sometimes more than one asking me to review the hotel I had just stayed and follow up emails saying that if I reviewed them within a certain number of days I would get an extra night credit towards my 10th night free stay.

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Johannes Guest

May 15, 2019, 12:01 am

I especially dislike it when the hotel asks me what they can do to improve. Then I tell them where they fall short and they do nothing about it except say something along the lines of we've noted your dissatisfaction and strive to make the necessary improvements to welcome you on your next stay. Uh, why didn't you empower employees to fix the problem when it occurred and I mentioned it to her? If housekeeping doesn't happen for multiple rooms over multiple days, you've probably got a bigger issue with management and employees that you should already know about... Unless you're incompetent.

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AD Diamond

May 14, 2019, 11:04 pm

@Lucky, you hit my biggest pet-peeve. No, the Hilton Garden Inn at the side of the road in the middle of nowhere did not exceed my expectations. And the Ritz Carlton in the big city probably didn't either. That doesn't mean the stay wasn't perfectly fine. And if you all constantly exceeded my expectations... guess what... my expectations would go up. I can't tell you how many times i've given hotels 6-8 for meeting my expectations and you would have thought I had sacrificed the manager's first born child. When I receive their email asking what was so terribly wrong, I can usually reply that it was absolutely nothing. They met my expectations. Sometimes I can provide some specific opportunities to improve and they seem to cope better with that. This is not Lake Wobegon and your children are not all above average. in fact, sometimes I'm exceedingly generous and they're still unhappy. I get that it is corporate expectations, but I'm not playing the game.

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