I’m always looking for companies that provide good service. I will gladly cut back on other areas of my budget if it means I need to pay more for good service because, quite frankly, bad service makes me grumpy. I don’t like being grumpy, and the people around me definitely don’t like me when I’m grumpy.
So if you’ve just recently started reading this blog and haven’t caught on to this trend, I hope you now understand why I favor certain brands. I like saving money, but it just isn’t the only thing that drives my decisions when I travel. Cheap points from IHG and Club Carlson aren’t enough by themselves to make me stay at their hotels.
But in return, I love showering praise on those who do a good job. Even when I flew on United, I wrote four letters to 1K Voice complimenting employees for every one complaint.
Recently I was changing some Points + Cash awards I had booked with Hyatt for a family vacation to Hawaii this summer. I have two rooms each at the Grand Hyatt Kauai and the Andaz Maui and needed to change the number of guests and bed type when one person dropped out. I thought it was all processed easily enough but later that day I logged on and noticed there were 50,000 points too many in my Gold Passport account. (I had spent 200,000 on 16 room nights total, leaving me with just 127, so it was pretty hard to miss.)
I sent off a tweet before bed, amused at the error and relating it to Hyatt’s “Surprise and Delight” campaign, but I didn’t really investigate the cause because I was pretty sure what it was. I’d leave that for tomorrow.
Tomorrow came, and I found I had a tweet, phone call, and email from Gold Passport checking in on my reservation. They knew who I was and apparently had already identified the problem. So now I know that Hyatt has linked my blogger identity to my personal account (…not really a surprise; I’d do it, too, if I were them). But looking past that I am really impressed that they made such an effort to look into the problem and try to fix it for me on a Saturday.
In another example, I had an upcoming trip from Honolulu to Los Angeles on American Airlines. I was surprised to receive an email alerting me that that the Admirals Club was shared with the Japan Airlines Sakura Lounge. The email included directions, a map, and opening hours. Wandering Aramean pointed out that this is not new. I wouldn’t know since I’ve only flown through Honolulu once before. But if it’s not new, that makes it even more impressive.
I don’t have an Admirals Club membership though I am an Executive Platinum member and was flying on a paid business class fare. Maybe that helps explain why they reached out. Even so, lounge access is not an included benefit for that particular route and fare class. My guess is someone at the lounge desk had free time on his or her hands and decided to send out an email to customers passing through on a future trip. But after visiting the lounge, which does, in fact, have some very friendly agents, it’s really not that surprising anymore.
So kudos to Hyatt and American. Your creepy data mining efforts to track my social media accounts and upcoming travel plans may not have been strictly necessary, but they did impress this customer and make me even more likely to recommend you to others.
