What are hotel guests’ top priorities?

It’s a pretty broad question.  The answer is subject to change depending upon which guests you ask.  Different groups of travellers, of course, have different priorities and uncovering them requires extensive analysis.

It is precisely this extensive analysis that our Hotel Guest Survey team undertakes every quarter across twenty-five markets, meaning you can get this insight quickly and inexpensively.  Based on nearly 50,000 interviews with nationally representative samples of business and leisure travellers, it provides a more robust answer to this question than a DIY online dip.  As well as looking at the market overall, we can cut data by age, gender, brand usage, familiarity, frequency programme membership, traveller profile – basically anything that gets asked in our extensive Hotel Guest Survey programme.

We can also look at the priorities of those who travel out from a market and those who travel in to a country too.

I had the pleasure last week of presenting at the Hotel Operations Conference to a room of brand owners, developers and asset managers on this very topic.  As the conference was in London, I chose to look at UK data and a few highlights are below.

Split the crowd or please the crowd

We have a number of choices for how we determine what’s “most important”.  If we look at average rank, for example, we get a broad view of the market or segment as a whole.  On the other hand if we look at the percentage of people who identify something as their top priority; we get a discriminating view of those attributes which mean everything to different groups of people.

When we focus on the overlap of high average scores and a high ‘top priority’ rating, we hit the jackpot.  These are the showstoppers!  Get these right or…. well, there isn’t really an alternative.  Priorities identified with one but not the other are either crowd pleasers (high average, low top box) or crowd splitters (low average, high top box).

Below are the showstoppers amongst residents of Great Britain who travel for business or leisure.

Showstoppers common to both business and leisure travellers:

• Good value
• Offers a great night's sleep
• Appropriately located hotels
• Consistent quality and standards
• Trustworthy
• Bedrooms that are suitable to relax in
• Welcoming

Showstoppers just for business travellers

• Free access to reliable Wi-Fi
• Bedrooms with up-to-date technology

Showstoppers just for leisure travellers

• Affordable luxury

Which brands deliver?

We also ask respondents to identify the brands with which they strongly associate each attribute. The tables below show the top two brands for each of the showstoppers in both the business and leisure list for people who have actually used the brand.

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