Samenvatting

The Palace hotel Zandvoort is a 4-star hotel situated at the boulevard of Zandvoort which is one of the most popular beaches in the Netherlands. The main problem for the Palace hotel are the bad online reviews. The purpose is to investigate what people are expecting from the Palace hotel.

The main question is: What are the needs and expectations of the Palace hotel guests and in which way does it differ from their experiences?

The management of the Palace hotel realizes they should renovate the rooms due to the fact that the interior is outdated. The main goal of this research is to analyze the needs and the differences between the expectations and experiences of the Palace hotel guests, in order to give recommendations for the new plan that is in the make for renovating the rooms. For this renovation, an external interior architect/designer is contracted.

The management also would like to know what kind of factors influence their customer’s satisfaction, so the interior architect can incorporate this in the new plan. The hotel fully understands that ‘loyal guests’ are ambassadors for the hotel. Recurring guests are loyal guests and publish positive online reviews.

For this report, the researcher conducted desk and field research, both quantitative and qualitative.
The desk research consists mainly of analyzing the competitor hotels and the internet reviews. The quantitative data (mainly via surveys) is analyzed in order to get a clear insight in the differences between the expectations and experiences. Based on this data the researcher has formulated the recommendations. The qualitative interviews were used to test some of those recommendations.
322 guests took their time to join the customer satisfaction research and filled out the online questionnaire.

After evaluating the customer satisfaction, it was found that guests are mainly complaining about the appearance of the hotel, it is very old and not up to standard compared to newer hotels. Guests are describing the hotel as “shabby” and “old fashioned”. The problem is that guests are having special/higher expectations of a 4-star hotel. This is very unfortunate because the results of the questionnaires have shown that the “tangibles” dimension is the most influential dimension of the overall satisfaction of the hotel guests.

During the research, it was found that unconsciously people have higher expectations from hotels or companies with a luxury name like “Palace hotel”. They compare the hotel with other luxury hotels and many guests associate the name “Palace” with words as luxury, chic, castle, wealth. This is not the image the hotel can live up to. Therefore, one of the recommendations is to change the name into “Tower Beach hotel”, this new name does not raise any associations the hotel can’t live up to.

It became clear during the research that a lot of guests were disappointed about the hotel, it is obvious that their expectations were different than their experiences. The main reason for this disappointment is that everything is below their “ok” level, additionally, nothing is found to be special or surprising. Guests would like to feel pampered and at this moment not even the minimum is introduced. This is one of the reasons why people are posting bad reviews online.

Different recommendations were made for the improvement of the Palace hotel.
The first and the costliest recommendation is to ameliorate the hotel and the rooms. It is very important to renovate the rooms for a better and nicer appearance.


Other important recommendations are:
- Renovation of the rooms, the reception and the parking place.
- Giving away some small presents to pamper the guests, like shower products of a well-known brand or a small bottle of wine.
- Improving the breakfast to a more luxurious breakfast.
- Better facilities like a nice “Nespresso machine” for free coffee and tea.

All those recommendations are necessary to create a better value for money proposition. When this is achieved, guests will be more satisfied and there will be an increased chance for higher loyalty.
One of the recommendations was to give 10% discount voucher to all returning guests. But research has shown that this will only increase the loyalty if the guests are satisfied enough. That is why improving the satisfaction is the most important thing to achieve.