The Hampton Inn's 100% Satisfaction Guarantee

BIMAP – Marketing Management

Concept Applications

Assignment 1 – June 9th 2012

Written by: Tamika Brewster

The Hampton Inn’s customers guarantee “Complete satisfaction or your night’s stay is free” can cause a variety of mixed concerns for hotel management, a couple of customer reactions and even abuse by employees and customers alike.

Firstly, hotel management’s opposition to this guarantee is likely, because of the lack of authority and control over any given customer service issue. If employees have the ability to make managerial decisions that could affect the hotel’s profitability, there is no clear line between managers and employees. Some employees may not be qualified in analyzing situations that will be in best interest for the customer as well as best for the hotel. Managers are hired into these positions for their expertise and experience, hence making them most appropriate for that type of decision making. Also, there should be some form of accountability for major decisions and that should be decided among management, whom has the authority to delegate. Secondly, if the dissatisfaction is a direct customer service issue, the same employee whom is involved in the customer dissatisfaction, should not be able to make a decision to grant this guarantee. Once again, there will be no accountability if this scenario happens, as employees can use this as a “quick fix” to any situation. This can be a form of abuse of this guarantee, which will be discussed later in this paper.

However, though this guarantee will say well about the hotel’s confidence, managers concern will be that it may be difficult to measure “customer satisfaction”. There are a variety of things that can cause a customer to be unhappy or happy with a given service. So to speak, this guarantee may over expose the hotel’s minor flaws; for example, if the hotel’s breakfast buffet carried a particular favorite cereal of a customer and the hotel happen to not have it one morning, the...