At one of the hotels I worked at we faced the challenge of being consistent in how we assigned room upgrades to our guests, and were not in line with the directions of our loyalty program. We had over 70 percent of return guests and were giving upgrades left and right, not just to the next room category, but to junior suites and up as well. This not only reduced the feeling of being special and recognized when receiving upgrades, it also caused our guests to feel entitled to the upgrade and to complain whenever we could not accommodate them. Even more we were not able to up-sell any of our guests that were actually willing to pay for a nicer room. We had a change of GM’s and our new leader made it very clear from the beginning that we would honor the guidelines of our loyalty program in assigning upgrades, and even assigning very frequent guests to the rooms booked, and that we as managers would be expected to be consistent with this. As expected it was a bumpy start and we had to deal with plenty of unhappy guests for a couple of months. Many of them asked to speak to the Hotel Manager and General Manager to express their unhappiness and to complain about the individual providing the service and denying the upgrade. To our surprise the GM stayed consistent with the message given by his managers and front line staff, and supported us 100 percent. After a couple of months the guest complaints disappeared, guests started appreciating upgrades again, were giving us higher scores on guest satisfaction surveys and started to book suites at a higher rather than always hoping for an upgrade. Continue reading Support is everything! →