Guest Relation Management {MYSTERY GUESTS} Flashcards
What is a Mystery Guest?
Someone hired by a company to pose as a customer in order to evaluate the quality of its service
Why use a Mystery Guest?
In a fiercely competitive market, any successful hotelier understands that maintaining standards to exceed guest expectations for every visit is essential to stand out
there are plenty of competitors chomping at the bit to take their place, should standards slip.
Mystery guests are real people and therefore offer a true reflection of the guest experience. They will lie in the bath- tub, set up their laptop in a bedroom, dine in the restaurant and sleep in the bed.
The carefully prepared and thorough reports they provide will give an insight into the experience from a guests’ perspective.
The importance of regular Mystery Guest Visits
Regular Mystery Guest visits, rather than highly anticipated one-off hotel inspector assessments, offer the most effective insight for identifying trends and setting or adapting standards.
What is Evaluated?
Reservations
The mystery guest should experience every distribution channel that drives business to your hotel.
They should book a reservation on the website and call your hotel directly to change it or cancel it.
Make sure the mystery guest evaluates the reservation call center at different hours of the day, so that they can see if the quality of the experience varies.
Hotel Stay
The Mystery Guest should experience the hotel operation at its peak periods as well as its slow ones to see if service levels are markedly different.
If it is a seasonal resort or hotel, it is recommended to shop a month before the busy season and one just as the season begins. The main point is that shoppers should be experiencing what your guests are.
The Mystery Guest will evaluate the following:
Method of Arrival (car, cab, shuttle)
* Food Outlets to be tested
* Resort Outlets to be tested
* Service Recoveries
* Special Tests
Hotel Inspector VS Mystery Guest
The Hotel Inspector is something of a revered figure in the hotel world.
With the power to bestow the honour of a listing in the famous Hotel guides, a visit from a hotel inspector is enough to cause the best room to be reserved, the best china to be laid out and all staff instructed to bring their A game to the table.
But is this assessment a true reflection of the guest experience?
While hotel inspectors are nothing if not thorough and can provide excellent feedback to move a business closer to a better listing, it is no secret that hotels are often prepped for the inspector’s arrival.
Consequently, a hotel inspector often sees an artificial showcase of a hotels service rather than a true reflection of the guest experience.
Hotel experiences can last days and touch several departments and so there is no substitute for seeing things through the eyes of a ‘real’ guest.
That’s why a more popular service for hotels is the completion of detailed Mystery Guest Assessments.
Unlike an external audit, the Mystery Guest Assessments measure the ‘actual’ experience of a regular guest. It is this experience that hoteliers need to understand thoroughly as these guests are the ones whose opinion could soon be appearing on an online social review site, that could make or break a hotels reputation.
