How often do you get asked how you are by people at travel industry gatherings? And do you, like me, sometimes wonder how many of those people are ever interested in your reply, or take any real notice?

And so it is with many companies in our sector, who have signed up to the idea of customer service and put all the necessary procedures in place, but yet fail to get to the nub of those issues, which really affect customer satisfaction and bring customers back.

I recently stayed in a well-known Midlands hotel with a highly rated restaurant and when asked by the waitress at dinner “how was it?” I said a little disappointing – the scallops were chewy and the duck was raw, not rare. She apologised and said she’d take it up with the chef – fair enough I thought. On checkout the next morning, I was asked by the receptionist “how was your stay?” – there was no mention of the fact that I’d had cause for complaint the previous evening, so I reiterated my comments about dinner, while at the same time saying that I had no intention of broadcasting my complaint on social media. She thanked me for not doing so.

Within a few hours of leaving, I received a generic email asking me to rate my stay, from one of the well-known third-party rating agencies. I completed the survey and in the comments section, again mentioned
my dissatisfaction with dinner.

By then, I was getting a little annoyed that there’d been no acknowledgement of my complaint, which was all I was really looking for. So I wrote to the chief executive of the company using the email contact address on their website. Guess what, no reply after six weeks and incidentally, no mention of my review on their website, suggesting that it had indeed been read and actively suppressed.

So here we have a hotel that had obviously trained its staff in customer service, had all the right processes in place, was talking, but not listening. I was easily recoverable as a repeat customer, but they missed their chance, not once, but several times and I won’t be going back.