Why Audit The Dog Friendly Welcome
The answer a guest receives decides the booking. Across the groups and portfolios we have assessed there is often a high degree of variance between hotels, even under one brand and one corporate policy. The variation is not in the buildings. It is in what each hotel tells the guest, and most management teams have never heard it. Our paper Dog Friendly Performance Across Luxury Hotel Portfolios sets out the pattern.
How The Hotel Mystery Shopper Audit Works
- An anonymous enquiry as an ordinary guest planning a stay with a dog, through the channels real guests use
- The answers scored against the Roch Dog Friendly Standard, with the evidence quoted
- Competitive intelligence on the hotels you compete with, from our ranked dataset of more than 3,000 hotels, for benchmarking and to outcompete them
- A debrief with your heads of department: what was said, what it cost you, and what to change first
- Typical engagement: 4 to 6 weeks per property
What We Listen For
Whether the dog policy is available in writing before booking. Whether the fee and any deposit are stated plainly and once. How many dogs are allowed, and of what size. Which shared spaces the dog may enter. Whether the hotel can arrange a walk, a sitter or a groomer, or can only recommend one. And whether the tone welcomes a guest or reads them their liabilities.
Who Does The Work, And How It Is Measured
Our assessors make the enquiry and score it. We run the debrief with you and your heads of department, and your team makes the changes. The measure is the scorecard itself, with every point tied to a quoted answer, and the prioritised list your team can start on. Most of the first changes cost nothing; they are decisions, not capital.
Audit And Certification Are Different Things
Certification is free, public and the same for every hotel. The audit is a private, deeper report for management, with the evidence behind every point and intelligence on the hotels you compete with. Commissioning an audit has no effect on your grade.
Questions
Asked And Answered
What is a hotel mystery shopper?
An assessor who contacts the hotel anonymously as a guest, in our case a guest planning a stay with a dog, records exactly what they are told, and scores it against a published standard.
Will our staff know they are being audited?
No. The enquiry reads as an ordinary guest planning a stay with a dog, which is the only way to hear what a real guest hears.
How is an audit different from certification?
Certification is free, public and the same for every hotel. The audit is a private management report with quoted evidence and competitive intelligence on the hotels you compete with. Buying an audit does not change a grade.
Can you audit several hotels in a group?
Yes. Multi-property audits produce a scorecard for each hotel and a portfolio view of where the brand's promise breaks down.
What does the audit report include?
The answers you gave, scored against the standard, the evidence behind each point, your position against the hotels you compete with, and a prioritised list of what to change.
Begin
Hear What Your Guests Hear
Tell us which properties to audit and which hotels you compete with. We will tell you how the audit would run and what the report would cover.
Talk To Us About An Audit