Queensway Group's Point A Hotels

Establishing a young brand's identity by understanding guest expectations, incorporating new tools into existing tech stack, and maintaining consistency across properties

• Knowing what guests expect

“We’re a very customer-centric business,” Dina explains. “People are central to everything we do… So without our ability to measure and respond to guest feedback, we wouldn’t be able to evolve as a brand.” It was this need to evolve that saw brand management looking for technology that could help them understand their guest experience. “How can we make it seamless?” Dina asks. “How can we eliminate any hurdles and problems that come in the way of their stay?” Hearing from guests via online review platforms left management with a high-level overview of how their guests felt, but lacked the insights that were needed to understand what they were getting right, and where they were falling short of guests’ expectations.

• Finding technologies that integrate well together

“We constantly look at what’s new in technology, and how it can facilitate not just our teams’ work, and make them more efficient, but also, more importantly, the guest experience,” says Dina. This meant that, in order for any new technology to be effective and fit into, or improve, the processes that were already in place, it would need to work in conjunction with the tech stack that Point A Hotels already had in place — from their Guestline Property Management System, to their online review platforms.

• Maintaining consistency and managing teams across multiple properties

“For any brand it's very important to have consistency in delivering the product as well as the service aspect,” Dina explains. “And how you measure that is what defines your ability to respond to it.” But without getting direct feedback from their guests, it was difficult for management to measure how consistent their guest experiences were across their properties, and to make sure that staff were receiving the training and guidance that they needed to deliver on the group’s brand promise.

A simple and responsive direct guest feedback and online reputation management solution that provides consistent insights and offers value for money

“We looked at three criteria that we were measuring different platforms on... One was simplicity, so our ability to look at our business in a snapshot, through a simple dashboard that’s intuitive... Obviously responsiveness and customer service... And thirdly, obviously, value for money — no business will look at a different platform without calculating whether the value for money is there. GuestRevu came across as superior for our needs across those metrics.”

Thanks to GuestRevu’s intuitive software, world-class customer support, and the consistent insights that the system helps hotels get from their guests, Point A Hotels are able to:

• Understand, meet, and exceed guest expectations
• Use a single, consolidated platform, which integrates with their Guestline Rezlynx PMS, to track feedback and monitor trends
• Measure guest experience to ensure consistency across their properties

Getting and using valuable insights into guest experience, implementing collaborative technologies, and achieving consistency across the board

“A platform or a system doesn't have a purpose if it's not used,” says Dina. “And the great thing about GuestRevu is that at Point A, we use it on a daily basis. It's pretty much in our daily processes, it's in our language.” Since implementing GuestRevu, Point A Hotels have developed a better understanding of what their guests experience, what they expect, and how they can not only meet those expectations, but exceed them.

• Making informed operational decisions based on guest insights

With the consistent feedback that Point A Hotels are getting, and the detailed insights that their guests are sharing, management are able to better understand what it is that their guests want and need. “It’s always interesting to listen to what is most important to the guests,” Dina explains. “And not just to what’s important, but what surprises and delights them.” As just one example, she explains how guests have responded to the lighting in their bedrooms. “It was interesting how many times our guests mentioned mood lighting, and how this was a kind of sprinkle on the whole stay that allowed them to be playful, to tailor the lighting to their mood, and it just created a very different level of experience.”

And the feedback from guests isn’t just showing management the touches that guests appreciate, but what they hope to see in future. “Through GuestRevu feedback, we realised that Point A Hotel brand’s guests tend to be more environmentally conscious than the average consumer. When we evolved our breakfast proposition, we took away, as much as possible, any plastic packaging, anything that is deemed to be environmentally unfriendly… [because] they told us they do not want to see any plastic in our to-go packaging for the breakfast offering.”

• Achieving consistency in staff training

“One of the things that we wanted to make sure about when we were looking at the different platforms and which one to go with, was our ability to train and make it accessible to the teams, whether on property or here at head office,” says Dina. “And the great thing working with GuestRevu’s team was that they were pretty much available at any time, but also that we were able to deliver training just through Skype. And our ability to share the screens, and just get the teams in the room to try different things and create the different dashboards and reports was great, because it was accessible and it was easy enough to replicate.”

• Simplifying processes with integrated technologies

“There are different systems that we work with, and different partners,” says Dina, “and GuestRevu has been working very well, very collaboratively with the different partners that we have on the other systems to get the APIs done, and to get the integration done across the board, so that we are able to look at our business in a single view, in a single customer view that would allow us to deliver on our brand promise.”

Just one instance of this is the way in which GuestRevu helps Point A Hotels to collect data from a number of online review sources, consolidating them into an intuitive dashboard, and making it easy for staff to address any concerns or compliments that arise. Not only has this simplified the process of finding and responding to reviews, but it has also become easier for management to make sure that the responses that are being left are consistent. “We do a monthly audit to make sure that reviews are responded to,” Dina explains. “We have a 48 hour brand standard — teams have to respond [within] that — and also a tone of voice and brand language. Are we bringing to life our brand promise through the reviews?”

• Using valuable reports and metrics on a daily and weekly basis

“We use GuestRevu on properties in handovers, or in our daily huddles with the team,” says Dina, “but also in the leadership team. When we meet every Monday, we make sure that we go through our reports, and one of the biggest metrics that we always look at is what guest feedback we have received over this last week, whether in aggregate as a group, or on property level. One of the tools we use is the Net Promoter Score. It’s the one criteria that we look at to see whether we are delivering on our brand promise consistently. So, having this ability to have the standardised metrices across all of our properties is hugely important it us.”

“To give a specific example,” she explains, “one of the things we were always debating was whether to put tea and coffee facilities in the rooms. There is a perception in business that tea and coffee facilities are absolutely essential. However, we wanted to validate that, so we looked at GuestRevu… and the answer was clear. There was no debate anymore, because we were able to validate that quantitatively through the voice of the guests, and not through any personal opinion.”