Hotels comment cards — those personal remarks scribbled out by guests and dropped at the front desk — may become a thing

Hotels comment cards — those personal remarks scribbled out by guests and dropped at the front desk — may become a thing of the past, reports Washington Post. And customer surveys — those questionnaires that show up within days after you check out — also

Published: 18 Jun 2006

Hotels comment cards — those personal remarks scribbled out by guests and dropped at the front desk — may become a thing of the past, reports Washington Post. And customer surveys — those questionnaires that show up within days after you check out — also

The latest initiative is expected to provide a more accurate picture of guests’ experiences. E-mail comments give the hotels a quicker sense of how customers felt about their stays; they also provide a larger sampling from the companies’ many franchisees, helping corporate executives aggressively monitor how those operations are doing, as per the information available.

“Some hotels are doing away with those old-fashioned methods and are relying on e-mails from customers to gauge how their chains rate with visitors. Two of the nation’s largest hotel chains, Hilton Hotels and Marriott, have moved to an e-mail version of the suggestion box,” as per the report.

“We call them comment cards on steroids, with the added bonus of being statistically relevant,” Jim Hartigan, Hilton's senior vice president of customer and quality support, reportedly said. The executive admitted that the group used to be at the mercy of whoever is collecting the comment cards. Hilton receives about 1.4 million mailed-in surveys a year, and the chain has saved about $1 million by shifting to e-mails.

As per the information available, by the end of summer, all of Marriott’s properties will eliminate paper comment cards in the rooms and stop mailing out customer surveys. In their place will be “online comment cards,” says Marriott spokesman John Wolf. The report added that Marriott says it switched to e-mails because the majority of its frequent guests were Internet-savvy business travelers who wanted their voices heard more quickly. Visitors who send e-mailed comments get an automatic thank-you reply from Marriott and not a personal response that deals with their views.

The report added: Marriott’s Wolf said the hotel makes the customer service results available to general managers each week; the comments are loaded in the hotel's computer database within a day. Previously, it took as much as a week to enter the survey information because someone had to type the results in after they arrived by traditional mail.

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