When we were at Tapestry I instigated a ‘Client Satisfaction Questionnaire’ form for all of our guests to fill in to gauge how well our service levels were doing both in the UK and Overseas. It was quite a detailed form and requested information from all aspects of the holiday…I think there may have been at least thirty questions ranging from the booking service, the airline travelled on, the transfer to the hotel, the host or representative and the various service elements of the accommodation.
Fantastic form……a bit of a pain to fill in!
We also requested that the guest filled in the questionnaire prior to leaving the accommodation and before the transfer to the airport for their flight back to the UK. Amazingly we had about a 60% return which gave us a true reflection on how we and our private villas and boutique hotels were performing. Interestingly (but not surprisingly) we very rarely received good reviews about the airline….our guests simply accepted that this part of the holiday was a necessary evil. Airlines in turn knew that they had a captive market and were only concerned with cutting costs at every level and selling drinks and duty free on board. I remember having to tell the crew and subsequently the MD of one airline that they needn’t announce that as the aircraft was coming in to land shortly it would be a good idea for people to buy bottles of water (at around £2 a bottle) as it was very hot in Dalaman and there might be a long transfer to your hotel. Two reasons for this, firstly the water purchased on board was grossly overpriced and secondly we at Tapestry Holidays would always give complimentary bottles of water to all our guests on their transfer. At Discerning Collection we still do this and believe it gives the right impression following the usual squashed up two, three or four hours flying!
Another interesting result was that our hosts in resort always had fantastic scores. Now this could have been because they were indeed excellent at their jobs but I suspect that some of our guests were not too keen to put disparaging remarks about them, as the hosts would often be able to read about themselves once the forms were handed into the boxes located at hotel receptions or at our villas. I’m also quite sure that some hosts would have binned some questionnaires if they had seen that the guests thought that they had been rubbish at their jobs!
So that’s why we’ve invested in FEEFO. A really good, easy to use questionnaire that is sent out to our guests by email once they have returned from their holiday. The service is very easy to set up and bespoke but at Discerning, we ask three questions….how did you rate our service in the UK? how did you rate your accommodation? and how did you rate our overseas staff? It take approximately fifteen seconds to fill in (twenty for me as I’m a bit on the slow side with anything requiring brain cells), and you can add comments. Actually you have to add a comment if you give negative feedback.
It’s a completely genuine review site in that it only gives us feedback from our Discerning Collection customers. All comments should they be good, bad or indifferent are displayed on our site as well on the FEEFO site and we cannot delete any comment made…ever (unless there are naughty swear words or something defamatory!) . You can check this out on the FEEFO tab on our home page at https://discerningcollection.com
We read every comment so we can change and review the way we work or indeed the product we offer. We get an email from Feefo if ever we receive a negative comment, in fact I get a daily report of all feedback received. We also always respond to all negative comments and these responses are also posted on our site as well as FEEFO’s. It’s the only way for tour operators to behave. If our product is not good enough we’ll know immediately. If our service isn’t good enough we’ll know immediately. Keeping customers is so hard in this day and age and all of us in the service industry cannot pay lip service to real service. If we get it wrong, we have to put our hands up…..and then fix the problem. We did get a few things wrong last year (we’re only human) but we won’t be making the same mistakes again.
FEEFO ensures we stay honest and we are proud to be associated with them.