Goa, the diminutive state along the Konkan coastline is synonymous for beautiful Beaches, scintillating nightlife and delicious seafood, in India. The state has an aura due to the natural beauty of its topography, which tourists across the world who visit the place once, find it hard to shake-off. This coupled with the advent of mining ban has seen tourism take the mantle as the most important industry in the state.

Goa hosted 80,15,400 tourists in the year 2018 itself out of which is 12% of these were international tourists. This accounts to about 3% of India’s foreign tourists. Not too bad for a state which occupies just 0.11 % of the total country’s area! There are 3800+ registered hotels in Goa with 43000+ rooms and 73000+ beds as of June 2019. 

The strong year-on-year (y-o-y) growth of tourists and high ROI has instigated the best hotel brands from around the world to set shop in Goa. However, over the last few years, data suggests that the growth has flat-lined but the new room additions have been on a continuous rise. This has led to a mismatch in the demand and supply causing excessive surplus of rooms. The pie which was big enough for everyone to share suddenly doesn’t seem big enough anymore! Macroeconomic factors like currency fluctuations also make it difficult for Hotels to predict and prepare for the year’s business. This mismatch has led to decline in tourists to rooms ratio and thus, occupancy rates are suffering throughout the state. 

In these challenging times, how does one manage to grow their business on y-o-y basis? The answer is Loyalty. Customer satisfaction forms a base for loyalty. An extremely satisfied customer is likely to recommend 10 more people through word-of-mouth or maybe even a beautiful picture of the hotel with family on Instagram! Likewise a dissatisfied customer will terrorise 100 potential customers with their experience over a beer at a get-together and ruin everything that a brand has worked so hard to build. 

We at Analytics Station, through our detailed analysis of the Hotel industry, have determined one important parameter which contributes to customer satisfaction: The Experience. As a data analytics & Marketing research company, we sourced reviews from various websites to check customer –experience at various hotels. The hotels across Goa got an average 3.9/5 satisfaction score.  The hotels from South Goa (4.02/5) are doing good job of delivering better experience than the hotels from North Goa (3.97/5).

Another interesting observation was higher the Star-rating of the hotels, better seems to be the experience. This can be clearly demonstrated as 5-Star hotels tops the category with 4.41/5 as against 4-star hotels with has 4.33/5 and 3-star hotels with 3.94/5.

As a measure, many hoteliers have a feedback form which they use to seek response from the customers. In most cases, pen and paper based method is used, which fails to record data in a systematic manner. Getting customer feedback is easy but getting it the in a way which can be analysed to get maximum insights into the business is not a straight-forward task. Customer Satisfaction Study is often done to measure customers experience and reduce GAPS between customer expectations and service quality. ASSIST is a tool by Analytics Station, which provides a scientific customer satisfaction study customised for each hotel. It flags the manager in case of a negative feedback, allowing the authorities to set right issues at the hotel instead of dealing with negative feedback online.  It automatically generates monthly / quarterly / yearly report which helps you understand your hotel’s performance accurately.