How "Being Our Own Guest" Enabled Us To Allow More Early Check-Ins (And Improve Guest Satisfaction 20%) - Roman Pedan, Kasa

Josiah: Many of you are on the road a lot and stay at your hotels when you travel, but I want you to hear why and how Roman Pedan, CEO of Kasa, stays at his property and what he's looking for when he does this. One of the changes based on something he found led to a 20% improvement in their guest satisfaction scores. When you think about it, that is a huge amount, and I'm sure you would like to achieve that as well. So stay tuned to get inspired on how being your own guest can lead to insights from proving the guest experience you provide.

Josiah: You spent a lot of time on the road and we were talking before you were recording how you're in LA, then now you're here, you're staying at each of these properties. Imagine that also constantly being your own customer makes you aware of things that maybe gives you some ideas or, hey, let's tweak this. I don't know if anything comes to mind there, but I imagine that's giving you constant feedback as a consumer of your own product.

Roman: 100% it's probably a burden and like it's a source of pride. It's like going to your kid's music recital or game; you're like proud, but also you're like the big, you know, your own biggest, it's a burden that, you know, I'm like noticing all the small things and like moving, you know, the lobby around a little bit to make sure that, you know, items in the lobby that the flow for the guests is better. I'm sure I create a little bit of stress for the team. It's out of love and care. And hopefully, that is how it comes, you know, through, but yeah, a lot of ideas come from those experiences. An example of one, of walking the floor and being in the weeds, but also using data, because those in combination can be really powerful, is how we treat early check-ins, which also really nicely connects with housekeeping. So, I would request early check-in during my stays and would rarely get it approved, which was quite frustrating when staying at Kasa. And one of the reasons for that is it's complicated when you don't have people on-site to make sure that the room is fully ready and do the cleaning on time. We looked at the data and we had 25% acceptance of early check-in. That is, in my view, quite low. This was a year and a half ago or thereabouts. We also looked at when a guest's check-in, early check-in was approved, what was the review score? Then we looked at the review score when their check-in was not approved. The increase between the two, so if we delivered an early check-in for you, was about a 20% improvement in your review score. That's dramatic; 20% doesn't sound that high, but a 4.0 becomes a 4.8, right? You can only go to five, right, if it's a 4.0 out of five. So, the maximum improvement was 25% in the review score. So these are really dramatic moves in the review score. 40 to 45% of our guests request an early check-in. And so we're like, wow, this is a big category. We're only accepting 25%, so for 75% of guests we're getting penalized, and for 25% we're delivering a delightful experience. Can we improve this? And so what we did is we pulled every lever across the guest stay. We changed the way we scheduled cleans to make sure we prioritized ones that had early check-in requests. We looked at moving guest rooms in order to ensure that the room was available. They were put into a room that maybe didn't have a reservation the night before if they did request early check-in. These are simple things. A couple of things are like more major tweaks that are harder for others to do. So after every guest stays on the day of the morning of checkout, we'll text you. Hope you had a wonderful stay here. You know, this is checkout time. Text us. Are you out of the room? Text us. Yes. And we were getting a high percentage response rate at like 9:30 a.m. And so all of a sudden, that cleaning can start at 10 a.m. And your window of time to you know you need to turn the room you start the clean instead of at 11 a.m. at 10 a.m. You can now have the room available by noon, whereas before, you struggled to have it available by noon. Fast forward to today, we're approving 86% of early check-in requests, and obviously, we'll never get to 100%. We can continue to improve and get ever higher. But on 40, 45% of stays, we're delivering that significant of an improvement in the feeling of hospitality that they receive, which shines through in reviews, which then, you know, to make sure that our property is some of the better ranked and often best-ranked properties in cities.