Gestion des plaintes dans l'hôtellerie (document en anglais)

Complaints Management in the Hotel Industry

In a service industry like hotel, customers tend to complain a lot and especially from 2008 until now because of the economic and financial crisis. So, they want to have a high quality with less money. These complaints are often logical but sometimes they are not. The main reasons are like not getting proper service by staffs and bad quality for food in restaurants. However, hoteliers should know how to deal with it, so these complaints can help them to improve the quality of the service in the hotel.

In this article, Taoufik HARAKETI propose a three-faces approach to handle with complaints which are preventing, dealing with and reporting. To be more precise, hoteliers shouldn’t promise something to the customer which it can’t be done, especially in advertising. Also, they have to study their competitors in order to know what the customers expect to have with the same prices. Otherwise, the hotelier have to take time to listen with full attention to the customer and tell him ‘‘yes I understand…’’ to make him calm. If the customer will spend more time in the hotel, the hotelier must solve the problem immediately. The aim is to show to the customer that he is the most important for the hotelier. By reporting the complaints, Mr.HARAKETI means that the hotelier shouldn’t only try to solve the problem but he have to identify the root cause of complaints in order to avoid a similar complaint from another customer. It can be done by a three steps procedure : collect, categorize and analyze.

Finally, complains are not bad for the hotel but they are very interesting if the hotelier knows how to harness them by improving the quality of the service in the hotel after knowing the source of the problem issue from the complain.

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