An Assessment of Key Hotel Guest Contact Personnel in Handling Guest Complaints

Abstract

The quality of a guest's hotel experience is frequently dependent on the consistency with which hotel standards of service are applied. Where the existing systems break down, guests will complain. This should be viewed as an opportunity for the hotel's management. However, some hotel direct guest contact personnel may view guest complaints as causes for panic rather than opportunities for improving the hotel operation. Guests whose complaints were resolved satisfactorily were willing to return back to the hotel. Proficiency in handling their complaints results in greater guest satisfaction and loyalty. The application of the research will be on Hotel Assistant Managers/Guest Relations Agents to investigate whether they are applying the necessary steps and techniques to solve guests' complaints related either to tangible or intangible products in hotels. Results indicate that Hotel Assistant Managers and Guest Relations Agents could improve their effectiveness in handling guests' complaints. Assistant Managers were found in this study to be better at handling complaints than Guest Relations Agents.     

Internet Diffusion of an E-Complaint

SUMMARY

“Yours Is A Very Bad Hotel,” a customer complaint in the form of a PowerPoint presentation, earned a degree of notoriety when it spread worldwide via the Internet even though it was not intended for public distribution. While none were solicited, its authors received over 4,000 e-mail responses to their e-complaint. This paper presents a content analysis of 1,000 of those responses. The results of the content analysis yielded interesting patterns of diffusion that have implications for hospitality practitioners and academics. The findings include geographic diffusion within and outside the U.S. as well as diffusion through professional groups and organizations over time. Patterns with respect to gender, employment sector, affective response, intention to communicate with other individuals and groups, and intentions for further usage of the complaints are also presented. Comparisons to theories of diffusion of innovations were also undertaken.     

Hotel chain affiliation as an environmental performance strategy for luxury hotels

Stakeholders are increasingly aware of the potential of environmental performance to benefit their health; however, there is a paucity of sustainability studies addressing the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance and the brand equity of hotel chains. Unlike traditional economics that treat undesired outputs such as carbon emissions as costless, this research presents an accurate, concise and clear empirical examination of hotel chain affiliation strategy through the Malmquist-Luenberger index to measure the brand competitiveness of the strategy while considering carbon emissions reduction using objective official panel data from Taiwan. The findings reveal that a group of hotel chains has a significantly higher average energy efficiency and branding value than those of a group of independent operators when holistic carbon emissions reduction is considered. Thus, this study encourages stakeholders to promote green hotel policies to independent hotel operators to achieve a higher brand value with lower carbon emissions and to adopt greater use of business intelligence to assist the decision-making of hotel operators in conformity with the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).