Hotel Brands: Your Relationships With Owners Are at Risk | Gallup.com
Measuring the hotel customer experience has evolved since the days when guests scribbled anonymous complaints and suggestions on comment cards. With the emergence of electronic surveys, sentiment analysis and other data tools, the industry has become increasingly adept at listening and responding to feedback from guests.
But few hotel brands apply the same systematic rigor when it comes to heeding the opinions of their business-to-business customers – particularly the owners of the properties that bear their brand's name. It may seem paradoxical, but the same brands that invest in third-party engagement surveys for guests rarely do the same for owners. This is true even though brands' ties with guests are relatively fleeting compared with their owner relationships, which span decades and net millions of dollars.
Hotel brands will argue that they do prioritize owner relations by providing dedicated owner support staff, training resources, advisory councils and recognition events. However, these are merely table stakes to enter the game – they don't provide predictive analytics to determine if owners will like the hand of cards they're dealt by the brand.
Brands must be able to monitor the undercurrents of owner engagement to predict when these relationships might be at risk. Without evidence to the contrary, brands likely think they're doing a better job of engaging their owners than they actually are. And brands' internal reporting on owner engagement could bolster misconceptions, because these efforts lack an unbiased third-party perspective and might not account for differences in owner type, size and maturity.
Gallup has meticulously studied hundreds of business-to-business relationships between hotel brands and owners. We've identified key engagement and brand preference drivers for investors, franchisees and management companies. For example, we've learned that new franchisees value pre-opening support processes, while large management companies place more emphasis on the brand being a valued business partner.
