The luxury brand JW Marriott gets a satisfaction score of 84/100 in the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index report.
Next is a group of what are called Upper-Upscale hotel brands that get 79/100, as do Upscale brands. Then Upper Midscale get 78, the Midscale brands get 74, and down the bottom, the economy chains like Motel 6 get 66/100 on average.
So what? Well, it’s interesting that even though it costs less to stay in the cheaper hotels, they still get lower satisfaction scores. Which suggests when customers give a satisfaction rating they’re not necessarily thinking “how good was it, for the money I paid”. They just think “how good was it”.
Great stuff, as usual! I always wonder how much what people say/write correlates with their “real” satisfaction, whatever that might mean 😉
It’s well-known that our ratings of things change based on environmental, peripheral, irrelevant factors; see, for example, Chapter ? of Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely. He describes an experiment where they were ostensibly trialling a new blend of coffee and giving cups away at a table where there were other things you could add to the coffee, e.g. sugar, chocolate sprinkles, etc. They asked people to rate the taste and how much they would pay.. When the condiments were in plain containers vs. fancy, guess what happened?
In my view, satisfaction and even Net Promoter Score are contaminated by irrelevant extraneous factors where people are forced into cognitive deliberation by the act of rating, which is not how we make purchase choices, if you believe Zaltman, Kahneman, Arielly et al. A better question would be something like “Would you buy this again’?”
Keep up the great work, and maybe see you at ANZMAC,
John