Guest Surveying as a Tool for Prioritizing Guestroom Improvements in Urban Hotels

The article examines guest surveying as a strategic instrument for managing the guestroom inventory of urban hotels, one that converts visitors’ subjective impressions into quantitatively measurable priorities for capital expenditure. The relevance of the study stems from the high velocity of the urban lodging segment, where constrained budgets necessitate rational choices for modernization and where the reputation index directly correlates with profitability metrics. The novelty of the work lies in a methodological framework that combines survey data with booking-management and CRM systems to account for customer lifetime value, thereby enabling a multi-tiered priority map. The main results demonstrate that combining NPS, CSAT, and CES indices with content analysis of open-ended comments, as well as audience segmentation, provides a reliable mechanism for ranking guestroom improvements based on their projected economic impacts. It establishes the fact that regular operationalized surveying can help shift management attention from being reactive to proactive, whereby every investment decision must be based on evidence relating to satisfaction drivers and their impact on RevPAR and ADR. The paper also documents typical practical mistakes—such as too general questions, lack of CRM linkage, one-off surveys, and non-inclusion of free-text reviews—elimination of which increases the reliability of analytics and adds managerial value to feedback. The article will be helpful to hospitality researchers, hotel practitioners, quality and strategy consulting professionals, and students in relevant academic programs.