Voting about Guests

No - I mean to open a blog - members are owners or employess of Hostels and tell what happend in here hostels with guests.
No name, no hostel name - anonym, but the storry about hostelling - like good news bed news.

I dislike it, if guest tell you by check out, I had a great time, nice Hostel, clean and.... and after one week you check your votings and the same guest voting bad for you.
I dislike to tell each guest, wow thank you for your minde - please vote positiv for us.
Mostely bad news better than good news!

Sometimes we all need informations from guest, because at work you be blind in your system.
If guest tell you, what kind of problems they found, and tell you as a information, you know, there not accept the negativs but your work.
D.H.

We hand out these forms to guests when they check in:

There is a postbox next to the elevator, so we don´t even see who drops in their forms - when the line for the email address is left blank it´s 100% anonymous.
About 10% of our guests fill in these forms, and the feedback we get is a great help to improve our hostels.

There is a "guestbook" at the reception, but nobody ever writes bad comments into it.

How many times did you tell a waiter that the food was awful?

Klaus: excellent. Cleverly laid out to allow for negative as well as positive

Well, I want to read negative remarks.

and the Poll is a nice bit of persuasion ("well you really did love Wombats, didn't you?")!

Hahaha, I plead "not guilty"! Honestly - we want to expand and I wanted to find out which are the cities we should look at. The answers are (almost always): Venice or Paris; those cities have a severe shortage of hostel beds.
No persiasion whatsoever indended - although you are right, it can be read that way. :D

I stayed at Wombats (Munich) last September, and I don't recall seeing any of those forms.

Ah, shame on them. The response rate really is suspiciously low in Munich - I always thought that´s because the box is not as easy to see as in Vienna.
I will ask them if they became a bit too lazy. :mad:

I agree with the first poster that finding out about a problem after the fact is not as useful as finding out ahead of time. At USA Hostels we email a survey after their checkout that asks a variety of questions about their stay and we get the results every 2 weeks for each location. This is extremely helpful in curtailing any bad trends ...and rewarding any good ones...quickly.

However, we also encourage our guests to tell us when they are in-house about any problems they are having. We know certain nationalities don't want to address problems head on, but writing a scathing review on Hostelworld or another site afterward is like a sneak attack. We strive to give the best possible service we can...and we can't do our best if someone doesn't tell us right away when the ball has been dropped.

I really wish we could get that through customers heads...that we want to know when something isn't right so we can fix it immediately for them. At our smaller hostel, this is more possible as the manager can get out and meet guests everyday...but is really much harder at our larger hostels.

It's disheartening to the staff to try hard and then get skewered because of something no one told them about. Luckily this happens rarely as we have multiple systems in place to keep our standards adhered too, but when it does it's always a "why didn't they just TELL us" moment.