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Your guests have checked out, you’ve inspected the property, all seems well, and your next guests are on their way. You’re at a bit of a loss, though. Did they enjoy their stay? Was the property up to their standards? Would they recommend your service?
Guest surveys gather this information, providing you with data you can utilize to make strategic choices about your offering, identify strengths and weaknesses in your operations, and generate marketing material.
In this article, we’ll help you make the most of your guest surveys by:
You’ll also learn how Minut increases visibility across your portfolio so you can protect your business and ensure guest comfort and better reviews.
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The main goal of a guest satisfaction survey is to gauge the experience of your guests throughout their stay. It’s an opportunity to find potential for improvement in your service. Your survey could cover key areas such as:
As your short-term business grows, you can customize your surveys based on the specific feedback that’s most important to you. For example, if you have a digital guest book or recommendations for the area, you could ask your guests if they found the information useful or what else they would like to see included.
Equally, if you’ve added automated guest messaging as part of your service, use the survey to understand how the guest experienced this and what improvements you can make to ensure they have all the support and guidance they need.
Before you begin to put together your survey, there are a few steps to bear in mind that will help keep your questions relevant and focused..
What are you hoping to achieve by sending a guest satisfaction survey? Are you hoping to make your check-in process smoother, improve cleanliness, or enhance your communication?
To help you narrow down on key issues, use guest reviews to identify possible weaknesses in the guest experience.
For example, a guest leaves a mostly positive review but notes that the kitchen lacked essential items. In this case, you could target this issue in your survey by asking for specific suggestions on what kitchen equipment and supplies to add to the property.
Alternatively, if you’ve recently added a new amenity to a property, such as a smart thermostat, you could use your guest survey to see if the guest found it easy to use and if it enhanced their experience. This might help you decide if it’s worth implementing across all your vacation rentals.
Use direct language that avoids any confusion. Imagine you want to know if the guest was happy with the level of communication about the location of the property, house rules, and amenities. If you ask the following question, you might not be able to make full use of the response:
Instead, make sure your question leaves as little open to interpretation as possible:
It makes sense for the majority of your questions to be yes or no, or a rating out of five, as these are simpler for the guest to answer and faster for you to interpret.
For example, you could ask:
While closed questions are useful, you might benefit from also including some open-ended questions which allow guests to give more detailed feedback and suggestions for improvements.
For example, you could ask:
Your surveys should take no more than five minutes to complete. Test out a few different versions with different guests and decide how easy it was to review the feedback. Did you get the answers you were looking for?
Did the feedback provide useful information that helps you make decisions about your services and amenities? Based on your assessment, refine and update your surveys to keep them as helpful as possible to your operations and business.
Here are some examples of questions broken up into categories that you can include in a guest satisfaction survey. The survey should be sent to your guests within 24 hours of check-out when you are most likely to get reliable feedback.
Also, be sure to request the guest’s email address so you can contact them in future for rebookings or other marketing purposes.
Overall experience:
Cleanliness:
Check-in
Communication:
Condition of the property?
Likelihood to Recommend?
You can tailor the questions and decide if you want to add a rating system or leave a space for the guest to leave open feedback depending on your preferences.
Just as you can be strategic about your questions, you can be strategic about when to ask guests to complete a survey. Generally, it will depend on the length of stay and check-out time.
For short stays of up to four nights, send the survey directly after the stay. Include it in your scheduled guest messaging as part of a post-check-out message.
For longer stays of up to a week or more, send a short survey to check in and make sure everything is going well. This will help you address any issues as early as possible so you’re seen to be proactive and attentive to their needs.
How you use your guest survey feedback can have an important impact on the level of service you provide and your ability to turn guests into repeat customers.
It’s not enough to just gather feedback from your guests, you need to turn this information into actionable steps that improve the guest experience throughout the guest journey from pre-booking to post-checkout.
By responding to your findings, you can get better reviews, boost your occupancy rates, and develop marketing material that you can share in your listings, on your social media pages, and on your website.
To enhance the guest experience even more and project a tech-enabled STR brand, consider a smart home monitoring solution like Minut to help you ensure safety while protecting the local community from disruptive guests.
The Minut sensor includes:
