Your guests know your rooms better than you do

What’s something your guests know about your hotel that you, as an owner or operator, probably don’t?

They know the rooms better than we do. They know which rooms are weird. Every hotel has them. The room where you can hear the elevator cables. The one with absurdly good water pressure. The one with the great sunset view that somehow never makes it into the room description. The one that just feels off for reasons nobody can quite explain.

Hotels tend to know inventory by category. Guests know it by experience because they sleep in the product.

“Deluxe King” might describe 40 rooms that are technically the same and emotionally nowhere close. And somewhere in the building, there is usually a front desk agent who knows exactly which one not to give the elite guest or VIP.

What are hotels telling themselves they’re selling that guests simply aren’t buying?

The hotel. Amenities. The restaurant. The pool. The list goes on. We sell rooms, and everything else is the hook.

Guests care about the lobby, the bar, the pool, the vibe. Of course they do. But eventually everybody gets in an elevator, goes upstairs, closes a door and spends eight hours unconscious in one very specific box, not in the lobby (hopefully). That box has enormous power over how they remember the entire trip, their intent to recommend and most importantly, return.

You can spend $20 million making the lobby smell like bergamot and ambition, but if the air conditioner in 614 sounds like a Cessna preparing for takeoff, nobody is going home talking about the bergamot. Hotels sometimes get so excited about everything surrounding the room that they forget the room is still the thing somebody actually bought.

What’s the weirdest or most revealing thing you’ve learned about a hotel room from guest feedback?

Years ago, I worked at a hotel where one repeat guest kept requesting the same room. It wasn’t a suite. The view wasn’t particularly good. Nothing about it jumped out at me. Finally, I asked him why.

He said, completely seriously, “The toilet is farther from the bed. She prefers it.”

His wife got up several times during the night, and in most of our rooms the bathroom was close enough to the sleeping area that she worried about waking him. In this room, the layout gave her a little more privacy. They had figured this out through trial and error, and that tiny architectural difference made it their room. Meanwhile, we had spreadsheets full of ADR, RevPAR, occupancy, room type and length of stay. Nowhere was there a field for “toilet sufficiently far away from sleeping husband.”

That stuck with me. The things guests care about can be incredibly specific, deeply personal and completely invisible to the people running the building.

What’s a hotel metric the industry loves to track that tells owners almost nothing about the actual guest experience?

Occupancy.

A hotel can be 98% occupied while several hundred people upstairs are quietly deciding never to come back while trashing you on review sites. Occupancy is obviously important. It tells you whether you sold the room. It tells you almost nothing about what happened once the door closed.

Hotel people can often tell you RevPAR to the penny and cannot tell you which 10 rooms generate the most complaints. That is a pretty funny information hierarchy for a hospitality business, if you ask me.

If every room has a story, what are hotel owners and operators missing by looking at the property as a whole?

How your guests experience your property: In a variety of rooms.

Two people can book the same room type, on the same night, for the same price. One gets the corner room with great light, a renovated bathroom and total silence. The other gets the connecting room beside the ice machine overlooking a roof full of mechanical equipment.

Then we ask both of them, “How was the hotel?” They did not have the same hotel.

Operationally, those rooms may be interchangeable. To the person sleeping in them, they can be completely different products. Averages are useful, but they can also hide an extraordinary amount of truth.

Anything else you’d like to share?

I think a lot about something I call the desire path. In urban design, a desire path is the dirt trail people create by repeatedly walking somewhere the planner didn’t intend. The sidewalk goes one way. People keep cutting across the grass. Eventually, the worn path is telling you something.

Hotels have desire paths everywhere.

Guests request the same rooms. They avoid certain floors. They move the furniture. They unplug the alarm clock. They ask for late checkout. They complain about the same shower. They tell the front desk, “Whatever you do, please give me a room away from the elevator.” They are constantly showing us what they value. And hospitality has a funny habit of treating those behaviors as problems to manage instead of information to learn from.

We try to make the guest use the sidewalk we built instead of asking why everybody keeps walking through the grass. The best operators I’ve known understand this instinctively. They pay attention to the weird little things. They remember preferences. They notice patterns. They change the product when people keep telling them something.

Guests are extraordinarily good at showing you what they want. If they keep wearing a path through the grass, maybe build the sidewalk there.