Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Programs: MR LT Titanium, IHG Plat.,UA Premier Silver, & PA/OH Turnpike Million Miler
Posts: 2,320
So the companies are just scouting for people who will recommend them/refer customers to them rather than truly soliciting feedback to help improve their services. Then they are being very disingenuous with the surveys which isn't a surprise.
As far as the don't play along, I skip the post review section of the MR surveys (and other similar companies: IHG, etc.). The only time I did post a review it was for an IHG property that should have been deflagged. I made sure I only used proper language (no swear words, no obscenities, etc.) and kept it strictly factual. My review never made it to the IHG site. Researching it a bit after words, it was fairly common for IHG to filter and never post negative reviews. I don't know if Marriott is guilty of the same filtering. In any case, I find the signal to noise ratio in reviews to be poor. I tend to look more at third party review sites for trends (Flyertalk, TripAdvisor, Yelp though not so much for hotels, etc.). The reviews on the hotel chains own website are generally worthless. The only thing I have found I can conclude from them is if the property doesn't have very strong reviews it is probably bad. Good reviews must be taken with a large grain of salt.
I guess I will continue to respond to surveys using my own scale calibration. Since they are obviously not anonymous, they can ultimately decide not to send them to me if they don't like my ratings scale.
Side note, a service department at a car dealership (that I no longer use), the service advisors always asked if there was any reason you couldn't give them all 10's. There pay was tied into receiving perfect survey results. I didn't play along at all there and didn't do the surveys because I couldn't in good conscious give them all 10's nor did I want to dock a portion of their pay. The dealership was a mixed bag. They did do some good things for me in the service department but there were other times I thought I was getting ripped off. On top of that, their service pricing was also high even for a dealership. So between not fully trusting them and the higher pricing I started going to a different dealer 30 miles away even though they were only 3 miles from my house.
Enough of my ranting for now... Back to your regularly scheduled thread on filling out surveys.
--Jon