10 Guest Experience Mistakes to Stop Making (and what to do instead)

At the recent IAAPA Expo in Orlando, I presented an EduTalk about guest experience mistakes that operators regularly make, and what can be done to correct them within the organization.  In under 20 minutes, I covered these 10 actions that are regularly seen across all areas of the attractions industry.

To improve your guest experience, stop doing the following:

10.  Separating guest experience from other departments

It’s hard to define what “guest experience” actually is.  Is it operations?  Is it marketing?  Is it human resources?  It’s a little bit of all of the above, and any department that directly or indirectly impacts the guest (which, in essence, is every department).

Let’s take online reviews as one example.  I often talk about reviews as part of guest experience strategy, and on occasion clients will tell me that it’s a function of marketing.  That makes sense, because it’s online and public facing, but it’s based on the experience… of a guest, so it’s guest experience.

INSTEAD: Look at guest experience holistically.  Rather than being a department or subset of a department, it’s an organization-wide concept that touches every facet of the business.

9.  Calling your guests “customers”

A customer implies a transaction.  I go in, buy something, and leave.  If it works, I’m a satisfied customer.  If the staff are nice, then the customer service is good.

In attractions, hospitality, tourism, and any service industry, the transaction is for an experience, which leads to a memory.  Because the memory is the deliverable, it extends far beyond a transactional relationship.

INSTEAD: Hit find and replace on every document and change “customer” to “guest” in all instances.  By embracing your culture of hospitality, the relationship extends far beyond the transaction and focuses on the experience that yields a memory.

8.  Telling your employees to smile

You can’t force someone to have a facial expression or demeanor.  If you do, it comes across as inauthentic and therefore leads to interactions that aren’t genuine.

INSTEAD: Reframe the standard to focus on projecting a friendly attitude.  If they focus on being friendly, this pulls in all of their natural expressions related to that behavior, and even if it isn’t an ear-to-ear smile at all times, the guest senses a higher degree of authenticity.

7.  Assuming your guests are experts 

This sounds counter-intuitive, but it happens all the time.  Your guests don’t have the same knowledge as you, your team, and your coworkers about the specific nuances of your facility or how to have the intended experience.  Even when we ask questions like, “How can I help you?” we assume that the guest knows how to be helped.

INSTEAD: Anticipate guests’ needs by answering the questions that they don’t think to ask.  Look for cues that the guest doesn’t know what they don’t know, and intervene proactively to offer a heightened level of assistance.  These interactions are usually brief, yet they can change the course of the entire experience.

6.  Striving for zero complaints

People tell me often that their goal is to have zero guest complaints.  That’s a losing strategy.  Reducing or eliminating guest complaints results in missing out on key opportunities to strengthen the relationship with your guests through effective service recovery, along with gaining necessary feedback to continually improve the experience for the future.

INSTEAD: Focus on driving higher volumes of feedback through your internal channels, allowing you to gain more constructive feedback privately.

5.  Giving refunds 

You probably have a no refund policy, and you probably break it from time to time.  While this is not a hard line-in-the-sand GX mistake, you should strive to exhaust more productive options than returning money.  A refund is considered a high cost, low value solution, because the cost to the business is equal to the funds that are being refunded, yet low value to the guest because it doesn’t actually fix the problem. 

INSTEAD: Focus your service recovery efforts on high value, low cost solutions.  You have so much to offer that your guests see high value in, yet the actual cost to the business is extremely low or non-existent.

4.  Asking guests to review you

Yes, you should ask for reviews.  But stop asking guests to review you.  This goes for every member of your team.  Take a look at your reviews, and notice how many of them simply mention an individual and praise for them, without any actual context.  If I’m scrolling through reviews and I see, “Ricky is great,” “Sarah is awesome,” “Hank needs a raise,” there is no substance here that will help me determine what the experience is like.

INSTEAD: Ask guests to review their experience, and motivate your employees to be the centerpiece of the experience.  If we know why these employees are great, and specifically what they did that made the experience remarkable, it adds considerably more context to prospective guests who choose to visit, and to management who knows what they are recognizing their team members for.

3.  Relying on online reviews/social media as your only source of feedback 

I once spoke with the Executive Director of a large attraction who said, “We get a lot of online reviews, so we get a lot of feedback.”  You get what you think is a lot of feedback from one source (I also checked, and they didn’t have that many reviews).  If you rely on online reviews and/or social media as your only source of guest feedback, then all of your feedback is public, putting the spotlight on the good, bad, and the ugly.

INSTEAD: Embrace the four pillars of guest feedback, including internal feedback, internal surveys, public feedback, and mystery shops, to get a full picture of your guest experience from multiple angles, directly from your guests.

2.  Botching responses to reviews

Too often, I see a response to a negative review say something along the lines of, “I’m sorry you had a poor experience.  We hope you decide to visit again in the future.”  This not only cuts off the conversation and eliminates any likelihood of service recovery, it shows prospective guests that you aren’t concerned when someone has a poor experience.

INSTEAD: Respond to a negative review with a sense of urgency, while also focusing on appeasing anyone reading it.  Say something like, “Please be assured that the experience you are describing is not typical and does not match the experience we strive to deliver.  I’d like to speak with you personally so we can resolve this issue.  Please call me at (XXX) XXX-XXXX at your earliest convenience so we can discuss this directly.  I look forward to your call.”  Make it personal, make it specific, and stress that you are keeping the conversation open.

1.  Restricting service recovery to leadership

Too often, I hear that guest service training for frontline staff does not include service recovery.  Instead, team members are directed to seek support from leadership to resolve guest issues.  However, service failures are part of standard operations, and whenever a team member says, “Let me get my manager,” all parties lose.

INSTEAD: Empower frontline team members to resolve a wide variety of service failure scenarios without needing to escalate to leadership.  This helps to streamline operations, minimizes disruptions, and enhances guest, employee, and manager satisfaction.

These 10 Guest Experience Mistakes are by no means conclusive, and as you look at your own operations, you can likely add on to this list, then focus on alleviating each of these, one by one.  Remember, the concept of guest experience has no plateau, and it can always continue to grow and improve, thus fueling the ongoing success of the business.

-Josh

Josh Liebman is a Guest Experience Strategist within attractions, hospitality, and tourism. Josh has worked for some of the top attraction operators in the world, and has been integral to the openings of multiple attractions. Today, parks and attractions hire Josh to ensure that they can exceed every guest's expectations, effectively resolve service failures, and drive loyalty through the guest experience. Over the last decade, thousands of team members across various attractions have attended Josh's Guest Experience Workshop, gaining the tools and motivation they need to take their guest experience to the next level. Josh is Co-Host of the AttractionPros Podcast, which has been recognized as the leading resource for attractions industry professionals. AttractionPros has published hundreds of interviews with the most influential attractions industry leaders, offering a wide range of insights for those building their careers in the industry. And in December 2023, Josh released his first book, The Hospitality Mentality: Create Raving Fans through Your Guest Experience.