Hotel Service Recovery Strategies in Action: Real-World Example and Lessons Learned

From both a revenue and service delivery point of view, a hotel stay equals more than providing a place to stay. Done well, it creates an experience that makes guests feel welcomed and cared for. It becomes the experience that connects guests to your brand and transforms them from one-time visitors to brand advocates.

For hotel-casinos, the relationship between the guest and the on-property hotel is even more complex and tied more directly to revenue generation. In this scenario, a hotel stay serves the following purposes: funnels guests to the casino floor; acts as casino loyalty integration through a comp system; awards and incentivizes players through tiered room system based on player value; and adds to cross-selling and package options. These services are key revenue generators for the hotel. In order to realize revenue opportunities, it is essential to infuse a holistic guest experience strategy into operations, service delivery, technology, and, importantly, service recovery.

Guest experience strategy vaults hospitality from its misidentification as “nice to have.”  It enables measurable hospitality moments that have real impact on your bottom line. For Atlantic City, in 2024, the number of that impact is 1.65Bn net non-gaming revenue.   Keep that revenue number in mind as we relate our recent experience at Harrah’s Atlantic City. As guests for an annual transportation experience conference at the hotel, our stay exposed operational and technology issues and poor planning. The result is what no service recovery plan wants: brand detraction, rather than promotion. Because Harrah’s Atlantic City lacked a strategic guest experience to drive service recovery, what could have been an inconvenience morphed into a disaster.

Today, using the example of this broken experience, we explore strategic improvements that enable service recovery for hotels, with a focus on how to overcome operational challenges and leverage technology solutions.

Anatomy of a Broken Guest Experience

Before we dive into best practices for creating and maintaining seamless guest experiences, let’s examine the recent negative experience  at Harrah’s Atlantic City, including where guest experience fractures occurred along the journey, and what customer recovery opportunities on-site teams missed.

In a nutshell, this is what happened. The hotel made the decision to recode the room entry keys for the entire hotel (whether due to intentional scheduling or an unplanned-for event) without informing guests clearly or providing support. This meant guests whose key cards worked in the morning could not access their hotel room that night. Remember, I shared we were staying at Harrah’s for an annual conference. So we certainly were not alone in finding ourselves unexpectedly locked out of our not-inexpensive hotel rooms at the end of a long day.

As you would imagine, this technology disruption led to long lines at the front desk. Lines filled with guests seeking service recovery. Signage was poor: 8.5X11 printer paper in plastic frames. Self-service kiosks were down. There was no extra staff – no one walking through the line to help move things along or to provide in-the-moment recovery. In short, it was a fragmented, frustrating experience that was avoidable. Even in light of the many complexities Harrah’s Atlantic City faces.

At the end of the day, this disruption and failed recovery highlighted the following gaps, all of which are necessary to address for successful hotel service recovery strategies.

• Unreliable Technology
• No Disruption Communications Plan
• Insufficient, Unclear Signage
• No Queue Management
• Disempowered Front-of-House Teams

These hard-won lessons provide an excellent use case for Harrah’s and other hotels on how to maximize service recovery and protect revenue.

Guest Experience Lesson 1: Know Your Guest

Now, we do not share this story to complain. Or to disparage the hotel. Rather, we bring this story to your attention (and theirs) to demonstrate all the ways – large and small – to infuse service recovery with hospitality. And to embrace the following lesson. Guest experience strategy that accounts for all the complexities of the casino-hotel experience and drives a guest-first mindset empowers brands to transform guests into brand advocates. Even in the event of a disruption. Especially in the event of a disruption. In fact, per Salesforce, if customer care is seen as “excellent,” 78% of customers are willing to pay your brand again even after a mistake.

Great, lesson, but what do you do first to make it a reality? To root guest experience design in an intelligent, intentional guest experience strategy, start with customer listening. If you truly want to serve your guests, you must know your guests. That means sourcing authentically representative data, building surveys, and initiating the right customer feedback systems to understand who your guests are and what they value.

Business travelers (as I was to Harrah’s Atlantic City for the conference) prioritize efficiency and seamless technology. Leisure guests crave personalization and memorable moments. All guest personas require – and deserve – clear communication and reliable service.

Drive Service Recovery through Proven Guest Experience Approaches

Once you know your guest, you can design and deliver the experiences they need, and empower your employee teams to deliver those experiences. At the core, this means you must anticipate needs and deliver proactive service.

Authentic human connection is a core guest need. In our digital-first world, humanity is the true luxury. Hospitality thrives on human connection. And technology can absolutely support human connection. When technology is done right. Admittedly, when you are staring down the operational complexities of a hotel-casino, the recommendation to focus on human connection can feel overwhelming, but it is both manageable and necessary. Human connection translates into revenue. It supports service recovery. And it compels guests to co-empathize with you, leading to more patience, quicker forgiveness, and reliable loyalty.

Genuine conversations, remembering guests’ names, and making them feel valued all work to create authentic human connection. A guest-first mindset initiates that effort. A guest experience strategy guides that effort. Technology systems support that effort. And hospitality staff training secures the success of that effort. In fact, training staff to anticipate guest needs in the smallest ways, like offering umbrellas on rainy days or recommending local dining options based on preferences, improve guest experience exponentially. Hospitality-trained staff are empowered to deliver exceptional service. They have autonomy to meet guests where they are, to resolve issues, and to create positive connections.

Leverage Technology Proactively

If technology supports service recovery, then seamless digital experiences are critical to a hotel stay. For service recovery, and to maximize the ROI of your guest experience investments, you need to get technology right. That means ensuring guest experience, operations, and front-of-house teams all have access to integrated technology. But access is not enough. Ensure everyone who touches the technology know how to use it effectively. Then, establish a plan for how to respond and communicate proactively when technology fails or when it is down for repairs and updates.

Even the sexiest intuitive booking systems, mobile check-in apps, and frictionless digital platforms are prone to service disruptions. And they are secondary in importance, impact, and customer sentiment to clear communication and authentic hospitality for service recovery.

The lesson here is to coordinate between technology and operations. Even the best technology (that you invested in heavily) fails to improve guest experience if it is not fully integrated into operational processes, guided by guest experience strategy, and supported by hospitality and technical training. When you take the time to train your frontline staff on the how and why of technology utilization, those tools become their secret service recovery weapons.

Seamlessness extends beyond the engineering of the technology itself. Seamlessness becomes your mode of service delivery across all channels, for a unified, supported experience. Especially when things go wrong.

Build Clear Communication into Hotel Service Recovery Strategies

No disruption plan means broken experiences. Clear, consistent, actionable communication, smooths the path to service recovery. In the case of our Harrah’s Atlantic City experience, technology upgrades needed to happen. That is the reality of working with technology. It is subject to both planned and unplanned outages and updates.

How you handle that reality is the difference between a seamless, positive experience and a broken, negative experience. It is a given that technology upgrades and operational changes must be rolled out with minimal disruption to guests. How to execute on that is less obvious. First, be sure to have a well-designed implementation plan. That plan must include training, contingency measures, and guest-first communications strategies.

Communicating to guests clearly, across channels, in a timely fashion to deliver actionable information that eases their painpoints and gives them back control of their experience mitigates frustration, saves time, and ultimately makes service recovery easier for your employee teams and those they serve.

Prioritize proactive communication to manage transitions, resolve issues, and empower both employees and guests, especially during periods of technology maintenance or changes.

Maximize Service Recovery Strategies

To secure revenue, particularly in an environment as dependent on customer loyalty as a casino-hotel, review your customer recovery strategies, guest experience strategy, and disruption plans. Audit them for alignment and guest-first approaches. And, even if you are seeing successful customer recovery outcomes, look for opportunities to convert all guest experience moments, even the difficult ones, into brand loyalty builders.

For help auditing your guest experience and designing service recovery strategies targeted toward revenue generation, schedule time with us.