Need opinions and ideas!

[Essentia]

Woo Hoo!

There are no bedbug encounters on record for this address.

 

[AZChins]

hehehe I'm glad you're happy about that.

I can't even imagine what I would do if I had bugs in a hotel bed with me! I'd probably run from the room screaming.

 

[Essentia]

I have worked there for 6 years and have only seen one bug. A roach that walked through the front door. We are very serious about our pest control as we live in FL so there are bugs EVERYWHERE.

 

[jags]

I have not stayed at your hotel but when I was there this winter the front desk person was very nice and helpful. Having spent the last 2 years pretty much living in hotels for my job I have found a couple things I dislike. For me the rooms do not have to be new or fancy but I do like them quiet and good and dark at night to sleep well. Bright lights outside the windows with junk curtains or a door with a large gap under it that leave the room looking like it was daytime really score bad from me. I am not scared of the dark and I do not need a nightlight. Noisy neighbors or motel equipment are another pet peeve of mine. The main reason I am there is to sleep so I want to be able to without interruptions. Easy access to electrical outlets by the bed and in the bathroom is another one. A couple places I stayed at last year had jigsaw puzzles or cards set out for people to use at night and it was a nice place to meet and talk with other people staying there while winding down for the night. I also have to agree that I am guilty and probably a lot of people are also of not filling out the survey unless it was a bad stay. We just do not take the time to fill them out when things are good.

 

[addictedtochins]

Some things I don't like is poor maintenance such as burned out lights, scratched furniture, warm A/C, windows that should open but don't. Pool, hot tub or other amenities that are out of order. I think you should do something to encourage employee moral, give out a gift card or free room as a reward to employees who do something outstanding. Your corporation should have some ideas for you as well. A library with free/inexpensive books and a computer with Internet access is nice, not everybody has a laptop. Breakfast of some sort is always great even if it's just coffee maybe add a doughnut. Perhaps your webpage needs updating, what do you have playing when someone is on hold on the phone. One good piece of advice I was told was to look up and look down, sometimes dirty or inferior things can be easily overlooked there. I would be glad to look at your web site or personal pictures to see if I can help more. Theresa

 

[Chinmama]

A book or folder that has a map of where I am and the stuff that's around me along with descriptions of those things... like nearby restaurants, what kind of food they serve and their atmosphere.

That's a good one! We stayed at the Double Tree in Atlanta a year or two ago and there wasn't even a phone book in the room. We wanted to order out and had to walk down to the front desk to get the yellow pages and had to flip through them there because that was the only phone book they had! The lady at the front desk said the guests were stealing them from the rooms so they stopped stocking them...

 

[Spoof]

I've stayed in some frightening places over the years, most notably the place ECBC CA holds their shows at....

1. Smell, please don't have any weird smells. Don't tell me it's a non-smoking room when it smells like an ashtray.
2. Clean - several of the places I've stayed have had pillows with spots of blood on them (including a cruise ship, which they kept saying they changed but never did). Pretty noticeable on white pillows.
3. I'm with Randy, just make it dark... no flickering lights. No bugs.

Best: Small inn/super 8? in OR. Everything worked, was clean, and no smells. Hostess was a ***** but it didn't matter, the room was awesome. Also hit an awesome Holiday Inn outside of Salt Lake city that had a fabulous room.

Worst: Super 8 in Nevada. I actually slept in the chair because the place was so scary. This place taught me to look at rooms before staying the night.

Funniest: Sacramento CA... I go potty. Ronda goes in, disappears for awhile, then comes storming out "I can't believe they did that, I'm going to the management!" -> I'm very confused. Turns out they plumbed the toilet with hot water, and she got a good steam while she did some business. Er, yea. Did that to her twice. She got me the last morning though, it does not feel good to have your *** cooked while you take a dump.

Hands down though, that hotel in Santa Nella is by far the WORST. Every single time is a nightmare for one reason or another. Being open only from 11AM to 6PM is not a good way to get business.

 

[addictedtochins]

One more thing, you could contact some local businesses and see about getting a discount/special deal for your guests by showing there room key and mentioning the "ad"

 

[CommonYak]

If you go to a hotel, what do you look for? What do you expect? What have you always wanted to see at a hotel that you haven't already? If you got a survey in your email after you checked out, what would make you give that hotel a perfect 10 as a score? I need honesty!
...
So help me out! I am honestly all ideaed out.

Customer satisfaction is a slippery thing, and may not always be completely correlated to the service you give. If the customer wakes up and has a bad morning, even if it is not your fault, that might lower their satisfaction and you would have no control over that.

I have seen this strategy I am going to describe work well in. In particular, I have seen this used by a particular car dealership who constantly got rated 10 out of 10 in their customer satisfaction surveys. I'm not sure how it translates over to the hotel industry, but hopefully if you are doing a good job, and treating your customers right it may be useful to you.

At check in, you might try standardizing your check in conversation, first telling your guest that you are being evaluated on guest satisfaction, and then asking your guests how you can make their stay perfect when they check in at the front desk.

Literally say to them, "We get evaluated by whether our guests can give us a perfect 10 out of 10 score. Anything less is failure for us. What can we do to make your stay a perfect 10?" And then listen to what they say. Because each guest is different, and may have different ideas about what they want. And then each guest will have to think, what do I want from this hotel stay?

If they answer you, you know what you need to do; you might already be doing it. As they check out, you can ask them whether they felt their stay was a perfect 10, and if they say 'no,' you could ask them what you could have done differently. You can thus get an idea how you did with each guest, and it will force them to articulate any issues that they had.

As I described above, sometimes people rate something low without a good reason, and forcing them to realize that they don't have a reason for rating you less than a 10 may make them answer the survey differently. They might feel silly saying, "I can't rate you a perfect 10 because I woke up and my boss yelled at me this morning." It may help them distinguish between the service you give and things you can't be expected to control like their mood.

Personally, as a guest, an odorless room (I am very sensitive to smells), a clean, somewhat firm mattress, peace and quiet, and rapid check-in and check-out would be all it would take to get me to rate a hotel a 10.

 

[Lynn & The Chins]

I stayed at the LaQuinta Inn where the ECBC National Show was being held. I'm a clean freak and told them so, so I don't know if my room got "extra" cleaning, or not, but it was fine.

When I was checking out, they asked me how my stay had been, and if I had any feedback for them. I told them that the fan running the heat/air was extremely noisy, and woke me whenever it came on. I said, "I'm not complaining -- I just want to let you know so you can check it out before the next person checks in". They immediately discounted my bill by 20%!!! That more than made up for it in my book!!! :thumbsup:

 

[Essentia]

Some things I don't like is poor maintenance such as burned out lights, scratched furniture, warm A/C, windows that should open but don't. Pool, hot tub or other amenities that are out of order. I think you should do something to encourage employee moral, give out a gift card or free room as a reward to employees who do something outstanding. Your corporation should have some ideas for you as well. A library with free/inexpensive books and a computer with Internet access is nice, not everybody has a laptop. Breakfast of some sort is always great even if it's just coffee maybe add a doughnut. Perhaps your webpage needs updating, what do you have playing when someone is on hold on the phone. One good piece of advice I was told was to look up and look down, sometimes dirty or inferior things can be easily overlooked there. I would be glad to look at your web site or personal pictures to see if I can help more. Theresa

http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/jaxsh-springhill-suites-jacksonville/

 

[threewingedfury]

http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/jaxsh-springhill-suites-jacksonville/

WAY too much BLUE!

I'd suggest different colors.. the blue is just, depressing.

 

[Essentia]

Haha. Unfortunately we don't have a choice. The new Springhill colors are way better (still a lot of blue, but more ocean colors like light blues, greens, etc) but until we have a renovation, this is the standard we are stuck with being a Marriott. If we were to change that we would lose our Marriott branding and in turn lose all these guests we are trying to keep happy.

 

[AZChins]

I like the blue.

 

[smhufflepuff]

Maybe there's a body causing the problems: http://www.snopes.com/horrors/gruesome/bodybed.asp

 

[3CsMommy]

I remember as part of our "Care Comity" meeting we were discussing issues guest have before they even reach the hotel. If a guest has a problem they before getting to you they will 95% of the time find something wrong with you too.. No matter how much out of the way you went for someone.

Speaking of other people's problems becoming yours, here's my most recent hotel experience.

Not long ago, U.S. Airways completely shafted my boyfriend's family and I on an international trip and forced us to stay in a hotel for 5 hours between connecting flights with our checked baggage stored for the night, so no clean jammies etc. Thanks to her own customer service and management skills, his mom landed us 2 rooms at a Sheraton 4 Points (instead of the Super 8 they tried to stick us in), free shuttle to and from the airport for the next flight and dinner coupons. The desk attendant at the hotel was amazing with the speed of check ins-- 6 people were given keys and rooms in under 20 minutes, so no more standing in long lines twiddling thumbs-- our rooms were side by side, and he knew off the top of his head 3 places that would take the meal vouchers and handed us menus for the pizza place. By that point I was fed up with pretty much everything and insisted that even though we had 2 double rooms, I had one entirely to myself so that my bad temper wouldn't sour things further with his mother. I fully admit that had one more thing gone wrong I would have given someone the rough edge of my overly sharp tongue, and probably wouldn't have cared who the heck it was until after I was done.

Then I sat down on a queen sized pillow top mattress with a gigantic stack of pillows and high thread count sheets (that were Clean!!!), took my shoes off and suddenly the world didn't seem quite so bad. (It helped that the room was green and beige and wood/earth tones, which I prefer in my own home.) I not only found the TV remote, but there weren't any extra menus or a series of buttons to push to get to the shows, just channel up/down. After ten minutes of unwinding, I decided to have a shower. As I rummaged through the bag I had with me, I noticed something on the floor under the divan-- somebody's beer bottle tops, that I know weren't mine. But, there was a comment card in the room that I decided to fill out in the morning so I could mention that housekeeping had missed something. At that point, I was so tired and stressed that bottle caps seemed like a minor thing after watching our connecting flight take off beside us because U.S. Airways kept us on the tarmac at the jet way instead of opening the gate and letting us the heck off the plane. Enough on that, back to the shower. There were plenty of clean towels that were actually big enough to cover most of me-- very nice because my hair reaches my waist so I usually need two large ones anyway. I got hot water almost immediately (I know the trick about even numbered floors having the booster pumps) and they had a brand of complimentary shampoo etc. that I could use in spite of my skin allergies. One nice long hot shower later, I dried off, cleaned up the bathroom (because yes, I'm paying for service, but I'm not there to make anyone else's life harder than it needs to be) and hit the hay, on that nice warm pillow topped queen sized bed with high thread count sheets.

Our wake up call came at 5 AM as requested, but went to the wrong room, so I ended up heading next door to knock on their door, then packed up and was ready to roll out by 5:15, still groggy, but feeling much better about the world. In the mean time, I did the comment card, mentioning the bottle caps, but raving about the desk attendant and amenities. Twenty five minutes later, my boyfriend's mom was finally almost ready, so my boyfriend and I went downstairs so I could start checking out. The same desk attendant as the night before recognized us, smiled, told me my room number and said that the shuttle was waiting (heater running)-- all we had to do to check out was hand him the room key. I left the comment card with him at the desk, where he had a file specifically for them. Eventually my boyfriend's mom and dad caught up with us and we were off for more fighting with the f^&$%^$ airline with a meal, a couple of hours sleep and hot showers under our belt.

Hopefully all that will give you an idea of what I appreciated and where I had problems with my whole situation, as well as what the competition is offering and doing well. I'd never have the money to stay at a Sheraton (the place in question: http://www.starwoodhotels.com/fourpoints/property/photos/index.html?propertyID=1989 ), or Hilton, or Marriott myself, so I'm not sure how "nice" it is as compared to, say, the Hilton Times Square or something. I will say, though, that I don't particularly care for blue so the theory that the remodel will help a lot is something I can agree about.

Good luck with figuring things out. I know how scary it is to face job cuts at a time like this.

 

[Essentia]

Ok guys, one more hotel question! My manager loved your other recommendations, so he wants to know, "If you could have one thing upon checkin, what would it be?". This is a physical item. We already have cold bottled water, and chocolate chip cookies at the desk. Don't say a million dollars! I need serious answers.

 

[Melissa]

DO you have an in house restraunt? If so coupons for it would be great. We give 20% off coupons for our guests to enjoy.

If you dont maybe have your boss partner up with a neighboring shop or eatery and get coupons to give to the guests. We also do that here where we have an italian place give us free wine if they get repeat business from us. So it will be a win win win.. Win for you your guests and the local places around!

 

[Ash]

Maybe you could get a couple of local restaurants and area attractions to give Marriot specific coupons for customers at check-in?

 

[Laurie]

Ash that is a great idea!