Who are we again?
Tomorrow I’m staying at the New Place Hotel in Hampshire, part of the Principal Hotels group. It looks like a lovely place, but it wasn’t clear to me from the website if it had a gym. So, this evening I did a quick search on my phone and top of Google’s list was the hotel’s own site:
Tomorrow I’m staying at the New Place Hotel in Hampshire, part of the Principal Hotels group. It looks like a lovely place, but it wasn’t clear to me from the website if it had a gym. So, this evening I did a quick search on my phone and top of Google’s list was the hotel’s own site:
I called the Book a Room number and got through to the Central Reservation Centre’s greeting message. Rather confusingly it was for DeVere Venues. Not wanting to make, amend or cancel a booking I chose Option 4 to ‘speak to one of our hotels’. Then – for the first time during the call – the IVR message informed me that the Central Reservations Centre was closed. However, the message explained that if I went to the website www.deverevenues.co.uk I would find the individual hotel’s contact details.
Well, I tried, but that site is inaccessible because that brand doesn’t exist and there’s an automatic redirect to www.phcompany.com/de-vere/
which is part of Principal Hotels’ website.
Undeterred I called the Book a Room Number but – unsurprisingly, in a way – I immediately heard a message saying “Our Reservation Centre is closed…”. Going back to the site I eventually tracked down the direct number for the New Place Hotel. I called it and it rang and rang – and eventually terminated with a recorded message suggesting I call back later.
By now it was quite late enough and I didn’t fancy calling back later! I eventually discovered that New Place does have gym, from a Trip Advisor review. It was a very favourable review, as it happens, but I’m sure Principal Hotels would prefer I found out about the gym from them.
So, why couldn’t I?
It’s particularly baffling that I had such a monumentally poor customer experience as I did some brief research and discovered that Principal had only recently (late autumn last year) invested in a major rebranding – hence the new name, new website and so on. There’s a lengthy article about Principal’s re-branding in The Caterer from 1st November 2016. In it their Director of People Development reassuringly comments “We could have launched the brand months earlier, but it is absolutely essential to the values and energy of the brand to ensure that the people values were in place first,”. Absolutely right, but I wonder exactly what he had in mind when he went on “It takes an enormous amount of time to get these things right…Give me three years and everything will be in place.”
I think he meant the cultural transformation piece, but perhaps he does mean listening to the IVR messages, checking the website and making a couple of test phone calls…
The proponents of customer experience can often fairly be accused of over-complicating things; sometimes getting the basics right can be very simple. Just like running a hotel – in Hampshire or Torquay.
*When this article was published on LinkedIn it provoked a couple of comments and you can see that Principal Hotels responded and said their senior management team were looking into the issue…! *
