Opinion | Days Inn’s new talking mirrors another sign hotels don’t listen to guests – wouldn’t you rather, say, faster internet?
- The mirrors at select Days Inn hotels in the US give guests compliments – voiced by US TV personality Ross Mathews – at the press of a button
- Guests being asked their opinions is only done to make them ‘feel’ valued, it seems – but then research shows they can be clueless about what they actually want
The recent announcement of a new in-room amenity from worldwide budget hotel brand Days Inn may have confirmed to many frequent travellers that despite the guest-experience surveys left on bedside tables and the further requests for comment at checkout, hotels don’t listen much.
Being asked their opinions just makes guests feel valued, but in fact hotels largely speak a language of their own, and speak it to each other.
Frequent hotel guests gradually learn to speak that language – what will be free within the room, and what will attract an extra charge. At breakfast, guests eventually learn that the cereal spoon is rarely part of the table setting but is instead found somewhere near the cereals. It only takes a few puzzled return trips for this piece of hotel grammar to sink in.
Hotels apparently often do things because that is just the way they have always been done, or, in the case of some novelty, because it’s the way that other hotels have started to do it.
Since the first one put a chocolate on the pillow, this rather pointless luxury gradually spread to become common even in meaner guest houses. The practice has begun to fade away because it no longer differentiates one hotel from another.
