Customer Loyalty Blog: The Wyndham Customer Experience a.k.a. Why I Hate to Travel

The Wyndham Customer Experience a.k.a. Why I Hate to Travel

April 04, 2005
Greg Robinson, Customer Loyalty Blog

It was a very rainy Friday. There was so much rain that the roads were flooding and construction sites were turned into mudslides. This made the trip to Orlando on Good Friday anything but good. Add to this too much traffic and too narrow a section of I95 and the 90-minute trip to the Wyndham Orlando Resort took twice as long as it should have.

When we arrived at the hotel, I thought that the most stressful part of the trip was over. I hoped that my family and I would be able to quickly check into our two rooms and ease into our long weekend. Not so fast my friend! That’s when the Wyndham Customer Experience took over.

The good news was that the front desk had our reservation. The bad news was that it was only for one room. Apparently Hotels.com failed to send the hotel the confirmation for the second room. Monica, the front desk service provider, called Hotels.com and asked them to fax a copy of the reservation to the hotel so that I could be checked into the second room. In the interim, she checked us into one of our rooms so that we could start settling in and agreed to have a crib sent to the room. I told her that I would rather wait for both rooms to be available so that we could get adjoining rooms and not have to move when the second room was available. She assured me that we would not have to move and gave us the key for one room in Building 14.

After dropping our bags in the room, I went back to the front desk to see if Hotels.com had sent the fax with the confirmation for the second room and, low and behold, it had just arrived. So far, so good. Monica continued with the check-in process for the second room and then told me that we would be moving to two rooms in Building 15. (I guess she had forgotten that I told her that I did not want to check into the first room if it meant that I had to move to another room later.)

Being ever the optimist, I assumed (remember the scene from the Odd Couple) that after the inconvenience of having to switch buildings we would move to the new buildings and get settled into our adjoining rooms. And what was my reward for switching buildings? Two non-adjoining rooms and the following view from the front door:

I guess I should have been more specific when I requested a crib!

Given the challenges of the check-in process and the less than appealing view from my room, I felt compelled to share my experiences with the manager in some faint hope that I would feel better and he might do something to make amends. He proved to be an excellent listener, but not much more than that. He used the rain as an excuse for the crib full of leftovers and the garbage bin that were left in front of my room. And he hoped that my stay would get better. I didn’t exactly leave this conversation feeling like a valued customer.

At the end of my stay, I looked for the ubiquitous customer survey cards that are typically found in hotel rooms so that I could share my experience with the company. The survey was nowhere to be found. At checkout, no one even asked, “How was your stay?” So I decided to write this.

You might ask, “What did I expect?” Unfortunately, not much more than I got. There are far too many customer experiences across all industries that leave customers wanting for more. What I had hoped for was (1) an efficient check-in process; (2) service providers who listen to their customer’s desires and set appropriate expectations; (3) a room/hallway that is “customer ready” when a guest is checked into a room; (4) managers that convey a sense of concern about customer satisfaction; (5) managers that acknowledge when mistakes have been made and make an effort to recover from them and (6) an easy way to provide customer feedback.

The lesson from my Wyndham Customer Experience is that companies need to put in reliable processes to ensure that customer expectations will be met. And when those expectations are not met, companies need to understand what happened and take corrective action. Why is this important? Research has shown that only 4% of customer’s complain when something goes wrong. The other 96% simply change suppliers and tell their friends and colleagues about the experience. In order to save customers and prevent the market damage caused by negative word of mouth, companies need to have a reliable process for capturing feedback at customer touch points and have well trained staff that know how to respond appropriately in the moment.