A hotel group needed to measure compliance with its company directives. With our shoppers we built groups of potential customers — family, business, leisure, companies booking for conferences. The shoppers assessed every service: from the reception welcome, to the restaurants, to customer assistance. Incidentally, we detected a shortfall in the billing of products consumed in the larger hotels — in several cases we did not find lunch or dinner on the invoice. After the first reports were circulated, management requested a different, fully electronic takings-management system that made errors of this kind impossible. On the quality side, the staff were not aligned with ownership and often pointed out the owners' distance to customers, or failed to apply company procedures because they considered them too detached from the property. Thanks to mystery shopping we were able to act on staff training, "stressing" the points where the greatest non-conformities had emerged. The best properties were rewarded with promotional materials and prizes.
