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You love your tour offerings. Your staff are great too. But what do your customers think? You can get a rough idea from reviews and repeat bookings but besides that, it can be hard to tell how guests really feel about their experience with you.
That’s where guest satisfaction surveys come in.
With a guest survey, you can gather feedback about your business that you might not get otherwise. Most guests have opinions, but they may not feel comfortable or motivated to share them in reviews or face to face.
The valuable insights you get from surveys can then help you improve customer experience, reduce bad reviews, and increase repeat bookings and word-of-mouth referrals. Ultimately, your future customers will be happier, and your bottom line will be, too.
Here’s how to get started with guest surveys and get the most out of them.
Creating Effective Surveys
Let’s start with how to craft an effective guest satisfaction survey and some survey response tips to encourage guests to respond.
Decide on Your Goals
The first step to creating a guest satisfaction survey is to figure out what you want to learn about.
That could be your:
- Booking process
- Tour or activity customer service
- Guides
- Value for money
It’s okay to have more than one goal, but knowing what you want to focus on will help you refine your questions.
Write Your Questions
Once you know the kind of information you want, consider the best way to gather feedback from guests on these topics.
You can choose from:
- Binary questions: These are questions with a yes or no answer, such as “would you recommend this tour to friends and family?”
- Multiple-choice questions: This could include questions like “how would you rate the value for money of this tour” followed by five options ranging from “very bad value” to “very good value.”
- Open-ended questions: This could include questions like “how did you find the quality of your tour guide?” followed by a space for guests to give an answer in their own words.
Binary and multiple-choice questions are quick and easy for guests. They’re useful for gauging overall sentiment, but the insights are more limited.
On the other hand, guests may be more reluctant to answer open-ended questions but, when they do, the answers can be much more useful as they provide more nuanced information about your business’s strengths and weaknesses.
Consider making your survey a mix of all types of questions.
Keep It Short and Simple
Survey length is also important. Too short and you won’t gather enough meaningful information to work with. Too long and guests won’t want to fill it out. Data from survey platform SurveyMonkey shows the drop-off rate of surveys increases with each additional question you ask.
There’s no hard-and-fast rule here, but consider making your survey concise, taking only a few minutes to complete.
As well as considering the overall length, be sure to use clear and simple language when writing your questions. Avoid complex questions that could turn guests off from answering, and avoid double-barrelled questions that could muddy your data.
For example, a multiple-choice question like “how would you rate the booking process and tour guides?” is really asking two different things. It would confuse customers and won’t provide you with any useful data as you won’t know what they’re rating exactly.
Example Survey Questions
To gather meaningful customer feedback for tour operators, consider questions like:
- How satisfied were you with your tour? Very satisfied, satisfied, neutral, dissatisfied, very dissatisfied.
- How would you rate your tour guide? Excellent, good, average, poor, very poor.
- How easy was the booking process? Very easy, easy, neutral, difficult, very difficult.
- How did you feel about the pace of the tour? Too slow, just right, too fast.
- Would you recommend this tour to friends or family? Yes or no.
- What did you like most about your experience?
- Do you feel like anything is missing from this tour?
- Do you have any suggestions for how we could improve?
You can also take this opportunity to ask guests how they heard about your business. This can give you great insights into whether you’re getting word-of-mouth referrals or results from your social media marketing or search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts.
Consider Survey Software Tools
You can use software tools like SurveyMonkey, Typeform, or Google Forms to create your survey. Some tools offer custom branding, analytics features, or skip logic.
Skip logic moves guests through custom flows based on their answers. For example, if a guest says they wouldn’t recommend your business to friends and family, an additional open-ended question box could appear asking why. This question wouldn’t appear if a guest says they would recommend your business.
One final tip: Make sure your survey works well on mobile to increase the odds of guests completing it. Nothing stops a responder in their tracks quicker than a poorly formatted survey that won’t open on their mobile device.
Distributing Surveys for Maximum Response
Now that you’ve got your survey ready, it’s time to send it. The ideal time to send a survey is soon after a guest finishes their tour or activity — think right after or one to two days after at the most. The experience will still be fresh in guests’ minds, so they’ll be more receptive to providing feedback.
You can send your survey via:
- Text message
If you already send a thank-you message, this would be the ideal place to add a link to a guest survey. With Rezgo, you can set up messages that automatically go out to guests after their tour or activity is complete.
If appropriate, staff could ask guests to fill out a survey once a tour is done by handing out a QR code. You can experiment to find out which method gets you the most responses.
Even with a short survey, you’re still asking for some of your guests’ time, so you might need to offer an incentive to encourage responses.
Go for something small enough that it won’t impact your bottom line, but big enough that it’ll get guests motivated to open and complete your survey.
A survey incentive could be:
- A 10% discount on future bookings
- Entry into a prize draw to win a free tour or activity upgrade
- Entry into a prize draw to win a gift card for a local coffee shop or online retailer
You can try one incentive and monitor your response rate to see if it increases, then switch it up if needed. The excitement of a prize draw may also increase newsletter sign-ups or social media followers.
Analysing Survey Results
The results are in! Now it’s time to see what your guests think. Refer back to the goals you had before starting your survey and see if you can get some answers.
First, you can analyse data from your binary and multiple-choice questions to discover the overall sentiment toward different aspects of your business. For example, you might find out that 70% of responders said the pace of their tour was too fast, giving you great feedback to act on.
You can then go through answers to your open-ended questions and look for common themes. You might notice your tour guides are always praised for their warm personalities and humor or that a few customers mentioned your kayaks are getting a little old.
If you notice a question is often skipped, consider why this could be — perhaps it’s too long or complicated — and make tweaks to improve your response rate.
Make it a habit to check survey responses regularly and compare data to see the impact of any changes you’re making in your business.
Taking Action Based on Feedback
To make the most of guest satisfaction surveys, consider how you can use the data you have to improve your business.
With positive feedback, you can double down on what you’re good at, reward top-performing team members to boost morale, and include new themes in your marketing to drive bookings.
For example, if you discover guests love the scenic coastal drive to your vineyard, you can include that in your wine tasting tour description as a selling point.
With negative feedback, you can address common problems to improve tour reviews and increase customer satisfaction going forward. You can also carefully share poor customer service feedback with staff and use it to train or support team members.
Finally, let your guests know you’ve listened to their feedback and made changes. This helps them feel heard, increasing trust and fostering brand loyalty. You could do this via social media or in your newsletter, for example, by announcing a change you’ve made based on customer feedback.
Final Thoughts
Guest satisfaction surveys are a great tool to discover what your customers really think about your tour or activity business. If you’ve never tried surveying guests before, start small and test different questions, incentives, and distribution methods to see what gets you the most responses and useful data.
With the insights you get, you can improve your offerings and customer experience, attracting more bookings from guests new and old.
Written By | Vanessa Gibbs
