People can make mistakes and things can go wrong, and when they do go wrong and our guests’ stay with us is affected by the service breakdown, it’s up to us to get it right and turn them around. A guest who experienced a problem and it got resolved to her satisfaction is more likely to return compared to a guest who just had an average stay without having experienced any ‘glitches’.

Service recovery is not rocket science (just takes a lot of practice), but it’s important to keep in mind that you want to solve the right problem, that you solve it to the guest satisfaction and not yours, and that you choose the right form of recovery/compensation.

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In my first year of working in a hotel, I was a housekeeping supervisor and we had a guest complaining about the room cleanliness during my shift. The guest was out for dinner and I was on a mission to not only getting it right, but also to ‘roll out the red carpet’ for the guest. I just transferred from cross-training in our room service department and remembered the beautiful cheese plate amenity and chose to have it arranged in the room with a bottle of our house red wine and an apology note. I ensured that the turn down was done perfectly and that everything looked sparkling. I left the hotel that evening with a good feeling of heroic accomplishment and I was sure to have turned an upset guest around into a loyal customer.

The next day I returned to the hotel only to learn that the guest departed the hotel and was furious about how she was treated by the hotel and our inferior service. I learned that the guest hated cheese, could not stand the smell of it, and that even after putting the plate outside on the hallway the entire guest room was filled with the smell of cheese. I learned my lesson, until a few years later when I sent a bottle of red wine to a guest who complained about his room setup not being done prior to arrival, only to get another complaint the next day because he didn’t drink alcohol and ‘we only made it worse by assuming that a bottle of our house wine could make up for our poor service’.

Practice makes perfect, and I learned that it’s most effective to empathize with the guest (and you can always apologize for an inconvenience caused without having to accept any blame), paraphrase the problem to ensure that you solve the right one, ask how you can help at that very moment, and how you can get it right to ensure a satisfying experiencing for the guest. Most will tell you straight up and be reasonable with their requests for compensation (I have yet to experience a guest requesting to stay in the Presidential Suite as service recovery). Always keep in mind that your recovery plan should depend on the hotel’s level of responsibility and the emotional level of the guest. If the guest forgot an important document in the room upon departure, and you go out of your way to ensure she receives it prior to boarding her plane, you are certainly her service hero. But if you missed a wake-up call and the guest missed an important meeting in return, well then you have to ‘roll out the red carpet’ just to cover up without becoming a hero in the eyes of the guest.