Guest satisfaction scores are an industry mainstay, used a general barometer for service quality and the ability to attract more bookings for the hotel. Reviews are also vital for error recovery, fixing perceived faults, addressing maintenance issues and assessing what to renovate.

But can these tools be used to guide changes in the customer and not just changes in the product? More directly related to revenues, can we use reviews to guide new initiatives or product developments that will future proof your hotel and create lasting brand advocacy?

Why Wellness Now
Let’s digress a bit to talk about a big trend affecting hotels that has yet to truly peak. Coming out of the pandemic, the proliferation of short-term rentals and home sharing platforms will result in an excess of accommodation options in many markets, so much so that hotel rooms are being compared one-to-one with what’s available via these alternate providers. Brands need every weapon in their arsenal to prevent direct rate comparisons with the likes of Airbnb in order to drive demand.

Where hotels currently excel versus home sharing products is in service and amenities. We have daily housekeeping (labor dependent), onsite restaurants, pools, lobby bars, social coworking spaces, spas, concierge access, friendly staffers at the front desk and 24-hour security. Still, all that may not be enough when the alternates come in with full kitchens, more uniquely appointed residences and on average more square footage per dollar in nightly rate.

Many travelers, particularly in leisure and bleisure, prefer the laissez faire approach to short-term rentals. Moreover, brands like Airbnb have done a fantastic job at creating the perception that their hosts’ accommodations deliver better experiences and better overall value to the guest.

Hotels thus need compelling reasons for guests to specifically select their brands and to cut through all the marketing noise. One lucrative answer to this challenge is to create strong wellness programs that offer travelers a personal health benefit during their stay. Due to the human and capital resources involved, short-term rental providers will have a hard time creating holistic wellness programs that bring together in-room amenities, spa facilities and other on-premises additions that work in concert to deliver a health-enhancing experience.

Wellness as Transformation
In 2022, though, wellness is a broad and rather vague term, with an armada of possible features that can be deployed which fit within its definition as well as a whole lot more than merely play lip service to the term. Instead, we advise to think in terms of what is being called ‘The Transformation Economy’ – a phrasing developed by acclaimed business authors Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore.

In its most basic meaning for our purposes, this term describes hotels that focus on making their guests better off – that is, transformed – than before the interaction. No doubt you can already think of some examples, for which a wellness program surely fits the bill.

But there’s an issue. The word ‘wellness’ focuses on the hotel product first. Instead, we must start with the customer as the intended target of said transformation then reverse-engineer the product accordingly. Per the title, we should reframe this as ‘wellbeing’ to focus more acutely on how our customers are affected by our wellness programs, both physically and mentally.

In discussing this with Laszlo Puczko, founder of HTWWLife, an international intelligence and advisory group focused on wellness travel, he added, “Wellbeing is considered to be a well-established concept that looks at the totality of being. Every service, product or program contributes to the customers’ wellbeing. Our job is to orchestrate the most fitting and appreciated contribution, which may not even be called or referred to as ‘wellness’. All we need to know is how the given amenity or service element improves one or more components of wellbeing. This is what we refer to as wellbeing engineering at the service design level, completed with setting up a W-suite group at the corporate management level.”

Start with Hotel Reviews
Coming out of the pandemic, reviews are critical for monitoring service delivery on limited staff and for directing product improvements on a tight budget. With a big focus right now on ‘micro-reviews’ consisting of one or two questions to reduce questionnaire abandonment, this leaves little room for assessing a traveler’s transformational outcomes while onsite to steer the product in a profitable, wellness-oriented direction.

Barring some possibly invasive monitoring technologies like in-room sleep trackers, bloodwork or full physical assessments, quantifying wellbeing at a glance is hard. Moreover, wide-ranging questions that are structured on the standard five-star scale – such as, “How refreshed do you feel after your time at our hotel?” – won’t elicit any actionable insights, despite their frictionless nature.

This obstacle is hardly a reason to forego hotel reviews as an avenue for discerning what guests will actually want in the future. Instead, we advise you structure your wellbeing-oriented survey questions in one of two ways:

1. Open-ended with semantic analysis. The five-star questions are easy to fill out but they are becoming a legacy of a bygone era. Using AI-driven tools, modern review platforms can aggregate and analyze written responses to generate quantitative confidence intervals from purely qualitative answers. And as for the friction of making guests write out those responses, this can be mollified by creating the survey short – that is, a micro-review – or by incentivizing the completion of the questionnaire via loyalty points or another prize.
2. Start by embracing one specific wellbeing direction. As previously stated, wellness offers an armada of options – F&B, spa treatments, sleep, fitness, yoga, meditation, digital detox, aromatherapy and so on. You can do market research but knowing the lifeblood of your property you probably already have a strong hunch of one specific area where you should start. Whatever you select, fully embrace it throughout your brand. Then, you can ask more discerning questions. If you chose to focus on delivering a great sleep to each and every guest, you might ask, “How well did you sleep?” or, more ambitiously, “What sleep amenities will you try to incorporate into your everyday life?” And if you have good platform integrations, you can line up specific services rendered with the questions asked. For a healthy F&B program, you might ask, “Do you feel the foods you ate enhanced your energy levels?” while for exercise-oriented guests you might similarly implore, “Did our fitness program help you to improve your regular exercise routine?”

Questions asked in reviews are, above all, a guide to reinforce a hotel brand by giving live feedback on the reception to a chosen product direction. With the strong case for wellness as a means of protecting future revenues, working back from the hotel reviews shows with a wellbeing-oriented mindset will demonstrate that you care and positively halo back onto your customer loyalty. Start lining up your survey questions appropriately so that you have a good pool of data to work off of by the end of year to enact serious product improvements to guide the business for decades ahead.