Enhancing guest loyalty in 2025: Using voice of the customer to deliver better hospitality experiences

Some guests are looking for a familiar-feeling home away from home. Increasingly, many are looking for personalized, one-of-a-kind experiences. No matter what kind of hospitality experiences guests seek, they expect those experiences—and every interaction with your brand—to be seamless.

Heading into 2025, CX leaders at hospitality companies are facing a one-two punch of heightened customer expectations and diminishing loyalty. Maintaining customer loyalty is key to business success, because loyal customers spend 22.4% more than sporadic customers and stay 28% longer.^[1]

So what can you do?

A strong, data-driven voice of the customer (VOC) program can help hospitality companies overcome CX challenges by placing customers at the center of all they do. Successful VOC programs enable a deep understanding of customer needs, preferences, and pain points—and empower teams to respond quickly and in a highly-personalized way, which can help drive engagement, and ultimately, boost loyalty.

In this article, we’ll look at how hospitality companies are currently gathering and acting on customer feedback, and what they should be doing going forward to drive success.

Gathering customer feedback is a priority

Let’s start with data collection. Most hospitality companies understand that customer feedback isn’t just nice to have—it’s essential.

Metrigy’s global research backs this up. In our AI for Business Success: 2024-25 research, nearly 86% of hospitality leaders said gathering feedback is “vitally important” and nearly 39% made it a top transformation initiative for 2024. ^[2]

As companies ramp up their VOC programs, they’re using several methods for gathering customer feedback. Our global Customer Experience Optimization: 2024-25 research study found that 70.1% of hospitality companies already had or planned to have survey tools in place in 2024, and 15.1% were evaluating their options or planning to add them in 2025. Most hospitality companies (74.1%) favor post-interaction surveys to gather feedback. More than a third also rely on one-on-one conversations and focus groups.

This focus on collecting customer feedback is encouraging, but just listening to your customers isn’t enough heading into 2025. You’ve got to act on customer feedback—and fast—to stay competitive.

Silos stand in the way of insights and action

For hospitality companies leading the way on VOC, the turnaround time between gathering feedback and acting on it is shrinking. For example, more than 63% of hospitality companies that participated in Metrigy’s Customer Experience Optimization research are already making strategic use of customer feedback in their contact centers to improve interactions.

But continued improvement is needed. More than one quarter of hospitality companies don’t have a 360-degree view of their customers—largely because their feedback channels and customer data are still siloed. Approximately 26% of hospitality companies are storing customer data in multiple standalone databases, which makes surfacing real-time CX insights nearly impossible.

Integrating customer feedback and analytics into a single platform can solve this problem. With such a platform, hospitality companies can consolidate feedback from various channels, interaction summaries, and embedded call recordings—and view real-time insights from a comprehensive dashboard.

As a result, they gain a holistic view of customer sentiment in real time, enabling them to deliver the kind of personalized engagement that drives positive experiences and breeds loyalty. Implementing such a platform should be a priority for hospitality industry CX leaders in 2025.

New tech and evolving customer journeys

As CX technology and strategies evolve, so too should the ways hospitality companies capture and analyze CX data.

For example, your 2025 VOC program should include any new customer channels, such as self-service. Knowing what keywords hotel or cruise line guests are searching for could help guide agent training for live interactions, and assessing completion and abandonment rates could provide more insight into customer satisfaction (CSAT), as well as highlight where improvements are needed.

Additionally, as hospitality companies expand their use of AI-driven virtual agents and chatbots, they should be using them both to help customers during an interaction, and to collect feedback immediately after it. Grabbing customer feedback in the moment is typically far more effective than trying to get a response later.

Having customer feedback at-hand can also boost the use of agent assist capabilities, providing the ability to tailor interactions to individual customer preferences and needs—which helps to boost CSAT and loyalty.

The expanding role and impact of AI in VOC

AI is revolutionizing customer feedback in hospitality. It’s not just about analyzing guest sentiment anymore—it’s about predicting it.

Picture this: A hotel uses AI to detect frustration in a guest’s feedback, pinpoints the issue (say, room temperature control), and predicts how it might affect their stay. Armed with this insight, the hotel can take proactive steps to fix the problem before it impacts the guest’s overall satisfaction and loyalty.

Hospitality providers we survey see considerable promise for incorporating AI in their VOC programs. Metrigy’s research shows at least 50% of hospitality providers are already using or see the benefit of using AI to improve CX, specifically to:

• Program survey questions
• Summarize open-ended responses
• Spot trends and automatically adjust surveys to dive deeper
• Track customer interaction patterns
• Listen to calls and analyze customer satisfaction

As AI technologies continue to evolve and become even more sophisticated in 2025, hospitality companies can expect to gain deeper insights from customer feedback and use those insights efficiently to deliver more personalized experiences.

Drive business impact with a strong VOC program

Effective VOC programs are driving tangible results for hospitality companies today, and we expect them to continue to do so even more strongly in 2025 with the expanded use of AI.

Our Customer Experience MetriCast: 2024 buyer-side market research study found that hospitality companies measuring the success of their VOC implementations realized a 21.6% improvement in customer ratings due to the use of AI in their customer feedback initiatives. ^[3] Additionally, the hospitality companies that use customer feedback insights to guide agents saw a 36% improvement in agent performance.

Clearly, by investing in integrated feedback solutions, leveraging AI for deeper CX insights, and acting on customer feedback to drive continuous improvement, hospitality companies can build stronger customer relationships and optimize customer experiences in 2025.

According to Hotel News Resource, the traditional hotel industry is facing increased competition from alternative sources like cruise lines, short-term rentals, and glamping.^[4] To CX leaders in every hospitality sector: the time to act is now. Prioritize your VOC program, embrace emerging technologies, and put your customers at the heart of everything you do if you want to win more loyal customers in 2025.

_{[1] BusinessDasher: 9 Hotel Loyalty Program Statistics: A Must-Know in 2024 (2024)
[2] Metrigy: Customer Experience Optimization: 2024-25 (2024)
[3] Metrigy: Customer Experience MetriCast: 2024 (2024)
[4] Hotel News Resource: CBRE Releases 2024 Global Hotels Outlook (2024)}