Every hotel gets things wrong. The booking isn’t quite right. The room isn’t ready. The meal doesn’t turn up. The neighbours are noisy. This sort of thing happens in the best hotels in the world, and the people who stay in enough of them know it. It’s how a hotel responds to it that matters.
We all know that no matter how good the service, sometimes things go wrong. But what matters is not so much what happens when things go wrong but how they respond when they do. This is a paradox. People who have a bad experience and have it resolved can sometimes be more loyal than those who have a good experience, and nothing goes wrong. This is the service recovery paradox.
Every service organisation has heard of it. But how do you put it into practice? The key is speed. A problem acknowledged and dealt with quickly is less likely to lead to complaints than one that’s ignored and then dealt with slowly. For a Chester luxury Hotel, visit https://rowtonhallhotel.co.uk/
Next is ownership. Whoever responds to a problem must take responsibility for fixing it. And finally, there must be a genuine response. The hotel must do something that acknowledges what’s happened and compensates the guest appropriately. What makes this hard is that in a good hotel, it usually requires discretion and the ability to decide on the spot. This means empowering staff to be able to make decisions and take action without always having to refer up the line. When a service recovery is done well, it sticks. People remember it. It’s a story they tell. Occasionally, it becomes a reason to return.