Well, I made up my mind to put some efforts in changing
today’s bad customer service and will exchange all personal bad experience with
my readers this year (anyway hoping not to have many). We all are experiencing unsatisfactory
customer service interactions here and there, but in most cases we keep our
emotions to ourselves, thinking that nobody cares, or that it’s pointless to
complain. In this way we let it slide without any punishment, make a mental
note to avoid the company in the future, and that’s it.
My previous article was about airlines’ bad service, and
today’s experience is related to hotels. Both services are very popular
nowadays for many people who travel for both pleasure and business.
Recently I had an unpleasant customer service experience with a well-known hotel chain Citadines, a member of The Ascott - a Singapore company known as the world's largest international serviced residence owner-operator, functioning in 95 cities across 27 countries.
Citadines is one of its three award-winning brands which we liked during our vacation spent in Lyon last summer. As all loyal customers, we decided to spend our winter vacation in the same brand, but this time in Tbilisi, Georgia. It’s our neighboring country and it is usually a four-hour ride from Yerevan where I live.
Recently I had an unpleasant customer service experience with a well-known hotel chain Citadines, a member of The Ascott - a Singapore company known as the world's largest international serviced residence owner-operator, functioning in 95 cities across 27 countries.
Citadines is one of its three award-winning brands which we liked during our vacation spent in Lyon last summer. As all loyal customers, we decided to spend our winter vacation in the same brand, but this time in Tbilisi, Georgia. It’s our neighboring country and it is usually a four-hour ride from Yerevan where I live.
So, without even
imagining that we’ll have any force majeure, we booked a non-refundable family
room for four people. When we heard the weather forecast with heavy snowstorms
for the next few days, we sent an email to announce about the weather
“surprise” we had, asking to cancel our reservation. Well, we “may” have
reached Tbilisi in fourteen hours instead of four, but when you travel with
kids, you try not to disturb them so much.
Soon we received a
reply from the hotel representative asking for our phone number to speak to us.
We called the hotel, and the lady told that when their management is back, they
hope to refund our money back. Afterwards we received another email, saying
that they cannot refund, instead next time when we book the hotel, they will
make some discounts.
I couldn’t imagine,
that the “reputation” of a worldwide operator could cost 550$. Is this a huge
amount for a hotel chain? Was it worth spreading the world about hotel bad
experience? I am complaining not about Tbilisi, but the whole chain policies
and normal human interactions.
My next step was
tweeting to the company, and imagine, they have a “good” social care - the
respond came the next day with the usual regretting tone for the bad experience
we had, asking for the details of our reservation… Anyway they haven’t
refunded. Later on we received an email, saying that they will try to make 50%
discount on our next arrival. And what would you do in our place? Would you
book the same hotel any more after all this?
They really had an
opportunity to turn our negative experience into a positive one, an opportunity
to make us remain loyal and not walk away. But reality is that they earned 550$
instead of maybe thousands of dollars, and which is more important – they could
escape negative word-of-mouth.
This is today’s
reality and I am sure many people all over the world experienced such
incidents. But time changes and we should express our opinion, tell about our
poor experience in hope that one day we’ll really have a better service with
better human interactions. We should build our future! Build it today!
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Thank you for kind words, Sri:)
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ReplyDeleteGood blog,
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