It's still interesting that some have spoken about discounts, some have mentioned upgrades, some have an extensive list of 'includeds' but guests are still not giving highest marks for value. What is it that the guests want? It's probably something different for every part of the country and if we could just match up our inns with the right travelers, we'd all be getting high marks!
No one thus far has said that the guests say anything was missing, and the reviews don't seem to state they were disappointed because something was missing. Another mystery..
We had a guest stayed here twice, they gave us a glowing review, BUT rated us only 4 stars for everything and a 3 for value. Both times they checked in late and both times they left
before breakfast because they were dealing with family stuff. They didn't have any opportunity to enjoy our place, interact with us or have breakfast, but
we get the lowered marks because of
their schedule. Why didn't they just go to a schmotel, if all they needed was a bed, and not bring down our marks? How can they judge the true value of our place, if they didn't stick around to enjoy any of it?
I think there is just nothing you can do about perceived value but keep your fingers crossed.
.
Willowpondgj said:
We had a guest stayed here twice, they gave us a glowing review, BUT rated us only 4 stars for everything and a 3 for value. Both times they checked in late and both times they left before breakfast because they were dealing with family stuff. They didn't have any opportunity to enjoy our place, interact with us or have breakfast, but we get the lowered marks because of their schedule. Why didn't they just go to a schmotel, if all they needed was a bed, and not bring down our marks? How can they judge the true value of our place, if they didn't stick around to enjoy any of it?
I think there is just nothing you can do about perceived value but keep your fingers crossed.
And why that type of guest feels compelled to offer reviews in the first place and then use a tougher than normal grading curve is another mystery.
I think there are a lot of frustrated, wannbe travel writers out there who really live off of seeing anything they can write "published" somehow, somehwere.
We had one a few years ago and while he gave a generally favorable review, one could tell from his profile that this was a very tough egg to crack. We laid off using the management response despite several inaccuracies he shared that I had to rebut with incoming inquiries for about six months until his review got buried behind others.
He and his wife were here one night, got the full tour of the property like everybody else and online he questioned the property size and even other reviewer's comments on its 4.5 acre size. This in spite of being told how big it is and never walking more than five feet anywhere from his car to his room.
Then he told the entire online TA world that if you don't like spicy food "you better not stay there, because everything they serve has hot green chiles in it. This in spite of neither of them choosing the one of three entrees offered that day that had any spiciness in it and the fact that we always offer at least one entree per morning that isn't even "southwestern" at all. And our entrees are prepared while the guest is at the table so anything could be left out.
If I had a nickel for every call or email I responded to that said "We'd love to stay at your place, but we saw this review about all the spicy food and we can't eat it."
.
Tim_Toad_HLB said:
We laid off using the management response despite several inaccuracies he shared that I had to rebut with incoming inquiries for about six months until his review got buried behind others.
He and his wife were here one night, got the full tour of the property like everybody else and online he questioned the property size and even other reviewer's comments on its 4.5 acre size. This in spite of being told how big it is and never walking more than five feet anywhere from his car to his room.
Then he told the entire online TA world that if you don't like spicy food "you better not stay there, because everything they serve has hot green chiles in it. This in spite of neither of them choosing the one of three entrees offered that day that had any spiciness in it and the fact that we always offer at least one entree per morning that isn't even "southwestern" at all. And our entrees are prepared while the guest is at the table so anything could be left out.
If I had a nickel for every call or email I responded to that said "We'd love to stay at your place, but we saw this review about all the spicy food and we can't eat it."
Not giving a management response to that review was a huge mistake. A simple clarification on his inaccuracies would have eliminated any potential guests' doubts and garner more business. What was your reasoning for not responding?
.
"Not giving a management response to that review was a huge mistake. A simple clarification on his inaccuracies would have eliminated any potential guests' doubts and garner more business. What was your reasoning for not responding?"
I started another thread on the topic, but in a nutshell, we felt like because he did give us four dots overall and we didn't want to appear ungrateful for that, we just let it lie.
Hindsight is 20/20 of course and had I known I'd be answering the "spicy food" question for like the next 6-8 months until it died down, I'd have done so.
The acreage issue wasn't that big of a deal. Anybody pulling in can see that with even the "front" yard, house footprint and parking area being about 200' x 500', this is no "average sized lot" as he described it.
But come to think about it now, one other issue he did criticize us on was a tough one on how to handle without making him look bad.
We have one room which is located near the kitchen and dining room. We don't even do our early morning prep in that kitchen in order to afford guests in that room as much quiet time as possible.
The walls here are 18" thick solid brick so things are pretty well insulated.
His wife was under the weather from what we could tell and she spent nearly the whole time in their room. He was hard of hearing and talked really loud all the time and when she was sleeping all afternoon of the one night stay, he hung out in the living room watching TV with the volume up pretty high. No other guests were around until late, so I didn't think to ask him to turn it down a little out of respect for his loss of hearing.
Additionally, the next morning he came out of the room really early and I happened to be sneaking into our sunroom where the coffeemakers are located. He starts jabbering my ear off at full tilt volume and I'm tiptoeing around to not wake anybody else. So, now another guest comes in the dining room to prepare himself a cup of tea and hopefully go out on the porch and enjoy the paper with his tea. This guy corners him and is yakking his ear off at full, hearing impaired volume and won't barely let him leave.
So this is what he put in the review:
"We got the Pajarito room, which the brochure and Web site imply is a quiet getaway. It is actually attached to the main kitchen and next to the TV/lounge area, so there was some related noise (though breakfast is prepared in another kitchen)."
Yeah, noise he created. I did have a few folks ask about noise who wanted that room who saidthey were light sleepers, but after explaining our approach and the other room choices, most still stuck with booking Pajarito.
We are hyper sensitive about noise disturbances for that room and 99.99% of our guests are like "Are you kidding, we not only slept like the dead, we couldn't hear a thing." or "We had no idea there were even other guests staying here"
He wasn't super critical about it and we kind of didn't see it as being a "stick out like a sore thumb" condemnation, so we left it alone.
We actually have one that is more critical and contains more falsehoods and exaggerations but its even older and just wanted all memories of those two people to go away. We were a lot more naive back then about the potential impact of negative reviews.
