The Hospitality Industry’s Guide to Turning Feedback Into 5-Star Results

Real-Time Feedback. Happier Guests. Stronger Bottom Line.

A smiling man in a suit pays with a credit card at a restaurant table; below, bread and a gourmet dish are served. The background features a grid pattern and an orange geometric shape, reflecting positive hospitality industry feedback.

Intro

Whether it’s a guest raving about the rooftop bar, flagging a room service delay, or leaving a lukewarm review about last night’s risotto, every piece of feedback is a chance to improve, impress, and stand out.

But let’s be honest: feedback comes from everywhere. Online reviews. In-person conversations. Post-stay surveys on websites or in-app. Without a way to collect, unify and act on it all, great insights get lost, and so do opportunities to wow your guests and customers.

That’s where this guide comes in. In this e-guide we answer the following questions:

  • What are the different types of feedback channels, and why does each one matter for hospitality brands?
  • How can hospitality teams use feedback to drive positive business outcomes?
  • What are some real-world examples from leading hospitality brands?
  • What should you look for in a feedback platform that’s purpose-built for the speed, complexity, and standards of hospitality?

Because when you capture and connect guest feedback everywhere it happens, you create experiences worth coming back for.

Let’s dive in!

Section 1

Customer Feedback Channels in Hospitality

In hospitality, experiences are everything—and listening to guest feedback is how you make them unforgettable. Whether you’re managing lodging and accommodations, food and beverage operations, or travel services, guest feedback fuels better decisions and stronger loyalty.

Building an omnichannel feedback program offers a complete picture of guest sentiment across your business.

Direct Feedback Channels

Think post-stay surveys, reservation follow-ups, comment forms, and check-in interactions. These are intentional moments where guests are asked to share how it went. Done right, they deliver structured, targeted insights that help improve operations across rooms, restaurants, and beyond.

Digital & In-Experience Feedback

From embedded prompts on your website or mobile app to digital menus and booking flows, feedback collected during the guest journey helps uncover friction points and highlight what’s working, whether it’s the check-in process, online ordering, or in-room tech.

On-Site and Real-Time Feedback

Guests often share feedback in the moment—at the front desk, with a server, or during a tour. Capturing this feedback through staff reporting, mobile prompts, or digital tools helps teams solve problems before they escalate while improving experiences on the spot.

Public & Social Feedback

Online reviews, social media posts, and travel platforms provide a steady stream of unfiltered guest sentiment. Monitoring and responding to these channels give you a pulse on brand perception, guest satisfaction, and reputation—while delivering future guests a reason to choose you.

The Alchemer Story

Collect customer feedback anywhere and everywhere
Alchemer gives you easy and practical ways to collect feedback during moments that matter, whether they happen in a survey, on your website or app, or in a third-party channel.
Section 2

How Hospitality Brands Use Feedback to Solve Business Challenges

The following scenarios illustrate how hotels, travel operators, and restaurant brands use customer feedback to improve guest experiences, reduce employee turnover, and uncover opportunities for growth.

Specifically, they showcase how hospitality brands:

  • Use location-specific feedback to ensure consistent experiences across multiple sites
  • Collect staff and employee sentiment data to reduce turnover and improve guest satisfaction
  • Capture feedback at key moments in the guest journey to optimize food, service, and atmosphere

Example Scenario 1

Ensuring Consistent Guest Experiences Across Multiple Hotel Locations

Scenario

A boutique hotel chain with more than 20 locations across the U.S. was receiving inconsistent online reviews. Some locations were praised for cleanliness and service, while others drew criticism for slow check-in or poor room maintenance. Leadership lacked a standardized method for collecting feedback across properties, making it difficult to compare performance and maintain brand standards.

Without centralized feedback, the hotel chain faced:

  • Fragmented data across locations: Each hotel used different survey tools or relied on occasional online reviews.
  • No visibility into location-specific issues: Executive leadership couldn’t easily spot underperforming locations
  • Inconsistent guest experiences: Certain location’s weaknesses were damaging the brand’s overall reputation.

Solution

Using Alchemer, the hotel group implemented a standardized, multi-location guest feedback program:

  • Branded post-stay email surveys: Automatically sent to guests 24 hours after checkout, asking about cleanliness, check-in efficiency, staff friendliness, and amenities
  • In-room QR code feedback: Enabled real-time feedback during stays—guests could scan a QR code to report issues with Wi-Fi, housekeeping, or noise levels
  • Location-level dashboards: Provided management with side-by-side performance metrics across different properties to identify standout and struggling locations
  • Automated alerts: Negative feedback was routed directly to each location’s managers for immediate resolution.
A smartphone screen displays a hotel post-stay experience survey, gathering hospitality industry feedback as guests rate their check-in as Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor, or Other and suggest improvements to the process.

Outcomes

  1. Improved consistency across properties through standardized service benchmarks

  2. Faster resolution of in-stay issues, boosting satisfaction and reducing negative online reviews

  3. Increased repeat bookings as guests felt their feedback was heard and acted on

  4. Data-driven operational changes, like retraining front desk staff at underperforming locations

Precise Targeting in Your Product, Mobile App or Website

Alchemer provides powerful yet intuitive targeting features to ensure surveys and interactions reach the right customers at the right time and place.

Targeting is broken into three key areas: 

Yellow Arrow pointing to the upper right
Screenshot of a user interface showing filters for Who with criteria Has Seen Event and cart_checkout_success. It includes buttons for Add a Rule and Add Segment with a caption: WHO Customer attributes and behaviors.
A section of a webpage titled WHERE with a search box to type and search events. Below, it reads Placement within the experience on a light green background.
The image shows a part of a survey scheduling interface with options to select start and end dates, shown as February 7 and March 19. It includes dropdowns for limiting survey views, set at 1 time per quarter. Text below reads: WHEN Frequency and timing to prevent over-surveying.

Example Scenario 2

Reducing Staff Turnover and Improving Experience in the Travel Sector

Scenario

A regional travel and tour company noticed increasing turnover among guides, drivers, and guest service staff—resulting in delayed departures, inconsistent tour quality, and reduced guest satisfaction. While they conducted annual HR engagement surveys, they lacked timely feedback on day-to-day employee experience.

The challenges included:

  • Delayed or vague feedback: Annual surveys didn’t capture seasonal or situational issues
  • Hidden morale problems: Many employees left without sharing why
  • Guest impact: Negative staff sentiment translated into poorer customer interactions

Solution

The travel company launched an always-on internal feedback program using Alchemer to collect feedback, monitor sentiment, and improve employee satisfaction:

  • Pulse surveys for field staff: Weekly mobile surveys for guides and drivers asked about workload, support, and safety

  • Exit surveys: Automatically triggered when employees resigned to capture actionable reasons for departure

  • Anonymous always-on feedback form: Provided space for staff to share ideas or frustrations confidentially

  • Guest-staff alignment surveys: Guest feedback was correlated with the staff who led each experience, uncovering coaching or recognition opportunities

Outcomes

  1. Dramatically reduced employee turnover year-over-year after identifying burnout during peak season

  2. Improved tour consistency by coaching guides using feedback linked to guest sentiment

  3. Increased employee engagement with more frequent recognition and support

  4. Elevated guest satisfaction scores, as happier staff delivered better experiences

Example Scenario 3

Elevating the Dining Experience in Food & Beverage

Scenario

A fast-growing casual dining brand with locations in airports and city centers was seeing uneven guest satisfaction. While some diners praised the experience, others raised concerns about wait times, food quality, or unfriendly service, but the brand lacked structured feedback that was being solicited beyond Yelp reviews and occasional comment cards.

Without structured feedback, the brand encountered:

  • Blind spots in the guest journey: Managers weren’t sure if problems stemmed from the kitchen, front of house, or speed of service
  • Limited real-time input: Most feedback came too late to resolve during the visit and only comes from the loudest customers
  • Unclear priorities: Should the brand invest in menu innovation, staff training, or ordering tech?

Solution

Using Alchemer, the restaurant chain introduced targeted feedback tools to capture guest experiences across key dining touchpoints:

  • Digital receipt surveys: Linked to mobile-optimized surveys asking about food quality, order accuracy, and staff friendliness
  • Tabletop QR codes: Allowed dine-in guests to share feedback mid-meal or flag issues discreetly
  • Drive-thru/order-ahead feedback prompts: Sent via SMS post-purchase to assess pickup experience and wait time
  • AI-powered open text analysis: Surfaced trends around portion sizes, popular menu items, and common complaints like cold food or long waits

Outcomes

  1. Increased NPS dramatically after addressing top complaints and improving front-of-house training

  2. Reduced negative online reviews by resolving issues in real time with on-site alerts

  3. Improved operational efficiency by using feedback to refine food prep workflows

  4. Clear product development strategy as menu feedback highlighted which items to improve or remove

Section 3

Customer Driven Success: Stories from the Hospitality Industry

Orange Dunkin' Donuts logo

Dunkin’, one of America’s most beloved coffee and donut brands, needed to deepen its understanding of mobile app customers as digital orders surged. With millions of loyal fans using the Dunkin’ app daily, the team needed real-time feedback on the mobile customer experience to drive smarter decisions and boost engagement.

Dunkin’ partnered with Alchemer to capture in-app feedback, enabling them to:

  • Improve Mobile Ordering Experience: With customer sentiment data, Dunkin’ identified and addressed friction points in the app’s ordering process. This led to a smoother experience and increased order completions—especially during peak morning hours.

  • Increase App Store Ratings: By proactively identifying happy users and prompting them to leave reviews, Dunkin’ boosted its App Store rating by 10% in just a few weeks—strengthening its digital brand presence.

  • Run Targeted Campaigns: Sentiment insights helped Dunkin’ tailor promotions to different customer segments. Happy customers received loyalty-based perks, while dissatisfied users were re-engaged with targeted win-back campaigns.
Alchemer Dunkin Case Study Photo showing Alchemer Logo in green with yellow background. A photo of glazed donuts with pink background. A close up photo of a Dunkin Donuts Iced Coffee drink and the Dunkin Logo
Section 4

What to Look For in Customer Feedback Software

In hospitality, every second counts, from the front desk to the kitchen. Your feedback platform needs to keep up. Here are four key features to look for when evaluating a customer feedback solution for your hospitality business: 

Dashboard and Reporting Capabilities

In hospitality, visibility drives action. Your feedback platform should offer intuitive dashboards that surface insights in real time, giving property managers, regional leaders, and corporate executives the clarity they need to monitor performance and take swift action. Role-specific views and customizable reports ensure that each team can focus on the metrics that matter most to their part of the guest journey

Digital Feedback Collection

Feedback should be easy to give and even easier to capture. Whether guests are checking in, ordering room service, or paying their bill, your platform should meet them in the moment with low-friction digital ways to share feedback.

AI Feedback Analysis

Collecting feedback is only half the battle—turning it into insight is where the real value lies. AI-powered analysis helps you make sense of unstructured data by detecting sentiment, identifying common themes, and flagging emerging issues early. The right platform will streamline the real insights from the noise so your team can respond to what matters most, without getting bogged down in the data.

Integration Capabilities

No matter how powerful, your feedback platform must play nicely with the rest of your tech stack. Seamless integration with property management systems, booking engines, HR software, and customer relationship management tools ensures that feedback doesn’t sit in a silo. It enables a closed-loop system where insights drive real operational and guest experience improvements across departments.

Conclusion

The brands that win in this industry are the ones that listen deeply and respond quickly. They turn everyday feedback (the good and the bad) into better service, smoother operations, happier employees, and loyal guests who can’t wait to come back.

With the right tools and unified approach, guest and customer feedback become a real-time engine for continuous improvement and guest delight.

Let’s turn your feedback into five-star results, together. Learn more about Alchemer for Hospitality brands.

Alchemer has decades of experience helping brands turn feedback into action.

In this article

Whether it’s a guest raving about the rooftop bar, flagging a room service delay, or leaving a lukewarm review about last night’s risotto, every piece of feedback is a chance to improve, impress, and stand out.

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