Guiding the Guest Experience

Excerpt] One of your many jobs as a hospitality manager is to seek ways to improve your guests' experience. You can do this, of course, by making investments to upgrade guest services or provide better products, facilities, and programs, but this is not the only place to invest your money—and it may not even be the best course. As it turns out, guests' perceptions of their experiences can be improved without huge investments. Instead, if you can get your guests to focus on the positive aspects of their experiences, their perceptions of your operation (and their evaluations) will likely improve. The other side of this coin is to avoid calling attention to unpleasant aspects of an experience. In this chapter, I want to discuss ways to encourage your guests to focus on their experience in a positive way (and to minimize attention on unpleasantness). This involves guiding the guest experience.