For Kassandra McLaren, the guest experience doesn’t begin with a review, and it certainly doesn’t end with one. As head of North America for Monty Reviews, she loves seeing operators reclaim time and front desk teams spend less energy putting out fires. We caught up with her to talk about reclaiming hours, reducing front-desk chaos and the power of real-time guest feedback.
—Interview by Jennifer Glatt, edited by Bianca Prieto
What operational challenges do you think independent hotels are underestimating most right now when it comes to the guest experience?
The gap between what a guest experiences and what the hotel finds out about. Most properties are running lean with front desk teams at partial capacity, managers stretched thin and the feedback loop is broken. A guest has a problem, they don't say anything to anyone on the property, and three days later, there's a Google review. The hotel learns about issues through public reviews, which means the damage is already done. In the meantime, everything is funneling through an overworked front desk. During-the-stay recovery is where independent hotels can actually win against the big brands, but you can only do that if you have a channel open for guests to reach the right person in the moment.
The second is the guest they never knew they had. Independent hotels are so focused on the booking guest that they're missing everyone else in the room—the travel companions, the group, the family member who actually had the leaky faucet and the bad night's sleep. Those guests don't exist in your PMS, they don't get your pre-arrival email or texts onsite, and when something goes wrong, they have nowhere to go except Google or TripAdvisor.
That silence between a guest's bad moment and their public review is what's being underestimated, and it's expensive. Operationally, emotionally and in lost future bookings.
How has guest behavior changed in recent years, particularly around feedback, reviews and communication during a stay?
Guests have gotten quieter in person and louder online.”
They're not going to the front desk to complain because that feels confrontational, and often they don't think it'll change anything. But they absolutely will pull out their phone after checkout and write about the noisy AC unit or the slow response to a housekeeping request. They need a proactive way to feel heard during their stay and to know that someone will try to solve their issue.
What's also shifted is the expectation of speed. Guests have been trained by every other consumer experience to expect a near-instant response. A text goes unanswered for two hours and it registers as indifference. That's a hard standard to meet when you're running a 150-room property with a front desk team of two.
The properties that are winning are the ones identifying happy guests in the moment and turning those positive experiences into public reviews while the emotional connection to the stay is still fresh.
What are you hearing most often from hotel leaders about the pressures facing front desk and guest-facing teams today?
Staffing is the through-line in almost every conversation. Most properties are operating around 90% of the headcount they actually need. The people who are there are doing the work of more people, and the front desk in particular has become the catch-all: check-ins, complaints, questions, requests. GMs are spending nine to 12 hours a week doing damage control on reviews and guest situations that never should have escalated in the first place.
What I hear from GMs is that their best people are burning out, not because the work is hard, but because the work feels invisible. There's no system for tracking who solved what; no way to recognize the person who turned around a bad situation before it became a bad review. When there's no visibility into the wins, the job starts to feel like damage control on an endless loop.
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Why do so many hotels still struggle to turn satisfied guests into repeat guests or long-term relationships?
Two reasons, and they compound each other. First, hotels often don't actually know who their satisfied guests are. They have no tracking system or way to connect positive or negative reviews to a certain guest or room. A significant chunk of bookings comes through OTAs, and that guest data never makes it into the PMS, along with the other guests who visit or are staying in the room, but didn't make the booking. No name, no contact, no record they were ever there. You can't build a relationship with someone you have no way to reach.
Second, even when hotels do have the data, the outreach happens after checkout. It’s a survey email, a follow-up message, something that lands when the guest has already moved on mentally. The moment where they actually felt something about the property has passed. By the time anyone tries to connect, it's marketing. It doesn't feel like a relationship; it feels like a mailing list.
The guests who become loyal guests are almost always those who had a real interaction during their stay, something that made them feel like the property was paying attention while they were still there.
Anything else you'd like to share?
The hotels I'm most excited about right now are the ones that have stopped waiting for the review to tell them how the stay went. They've figured out that the guest experience is a live thing. It's happening in real time, and it can be shaped in real time.
(Image courtesy Kassandra McLaren)
Mint Pillow’s Take
Here's the thing about reviews: they're history, not hospitality. Guests don't become regulars because they received a survey three days later—they come back because someone made them feel noticed as soon as they walked through the front door. Indie hotels are uniquely positioned to catch issues early and address them promptly by creating feedback loops during the stay when problems are still fixable and emotional goodwill is intact. Reviews are just the receipts.
