Why Guest Feedback Is Important For Hotels

Updated on October, 2024.

Every hotel is trying their best to retain their customers, satisfy them and create a good user experience for every guest. However, how can hoteliers know if their effort is actually yielding results if they don’t collect guest feedback?

Your customers experience in their own words is good data which you can use to improve your product and services and also make a good decision based on the data. Below we are going to discuss some of the importance of guest feedback.

Why Hotels Should Collect Direct Guest Reviews (and When It Matters Most)

Many hotels rely heavily on third-party platforms like Google Reviews to understand guest satisfaction. While public reviews are important for marketing, they are too late and too shallow to improve the guest experience in real time.

Collecting direct guest reviews gives hotels something far more valuable: actionable insight while the guest is still staying with you.

The Best Time to Collect Reviews: The First Night

The most critical moment to ask for feedback is after the first night of stay.

By this time, the guest has already experienced:

• The room condition
• Check-in process
• Cleanliness
• Noise level
• Comfort of the bed and facilities

If a guest is unhappy and you only find out after check-out (via Google Reviews), the opportunity to recover the experience is gone.

When feedback is collected early:

• Front desk can fix issues immediately
• Housekeeping can respond the same day
• Minor complaints don’t turn into public negative reviews
• Guests feel heard, not ignored

A resolved problem often leads to higher satisfaction than no problem at all.

With systems like Softinn, this first-night feedback can be sent automatically, allowing hotels to capture guest sentiment at the right time without adding extra work for the front desk.

Direct Reviews Give You More Meaningful Data

Third-party reviews are generic. They usually tell you what happened, but not why.

With direct reviews, hotels can attach important context, such as:

• Room type (Standard, Deluxe, Family, Suite)

• Length of stay

• Stay period (weekday vs weekend, peak vs off-peak)

• Booking source (direct, OTA, corporate)

This adds powerful dimensions to your data.

For example:

• Are complaints coming mainly from a specific room type?

• Do weekend guests rate noise lower than weekday guests?

• Are long-stay guests happier than short-stay guests?

• Which crew is working on that shift?

This insight helps hotels:

• Improve specific room categories

• Adjust operations during peak periods

• Make smarter renovation and staffing decisions

• Educate and train the teams based on customer feedbacks

Public reviews help with visibility.
Direct reviews help with control and improvement.

Hotels that collect feedback early and with context don’t just protect their online reputation — they actively design better guest experiences.

If you can fix a problem before checkout, you don’t need to explain it in a Google reply later.

When these verified reviews are displayed directly on the Softinn booking engine, they help reassure potential guests, keep them engaged during the booking journey, and build trust—ultimately improving booking conversion with authentic, stay-based feedback.

Helps Improve Products and Services

You can have a wonderful product and at the same time offer an amazing service. The product and services you launched are usually done after conducting market research to understand if your hotel guest will be interested to book to your hotel.

But it is only when these guests have actually tried this product or this service will you know for sure the benefit, the flaws, and the areas of improvement for your product and services. So, your customer feedback will be able to tell you what is working and what needs to be changed.

Helps You Measure Customer Satisfaction

As a hotelier, you need to understand that your guest satisfaction directly affects your business performance either positively or negatively. We know you try your best as a hotelier to satisfy your daily guest, but how can you measure your guest satisfaction if you don’t get their feedback?

When you see your profit and your room booking rate drop, it is important that you get some feedback from your guests to better understand if their dissatisfaction is the cause of the decrease in the revenue. When this is done you can change or modify your services to better satisfy your guests.

Helps You Create the Best Customer Experience

Every hotel guest wants to have an amazing experience from their booking. Starting from the booking process in your hotel website or social media pages, your hotel front desk staff to your check-in and check-out process, it is not hard to turn a guest who has had an amazing experience in your hotel into a loyal guest.

That being said, the best way as a hotelier to give your guest an amazing experience is to ask them what they like and what you can improve about your product and services. 

Guest Trust Customer Feedback More

When it comes to booking a room a potential guest usually reads the feedbacks and reviews of your hotel from other guests that had stayed and provided online reviews. Your job as a hotelier is to make sure that your guest is satisfied and that they have an amazing experience in your hotel. This will result in them giving positive feedback to their friends and online which in return, it will increase your room booking.

In conclusion, guest feedback is something a hotel can’t ignore. With guest feedback, a hotelier will be able to understand his guests better and how to serve them best.