By: Jonathan Barsky, Lenny Nash

Which hotels provide the best food and beverage service? How do these services affect hotel guest loyalty? Which guests demand outstanding food and beverage service and which ones are quite satisfied with a standard offering? To help answer these questions new questions evaluating hotel restaurants, room service and lounges were added to the Market Metrix Hospitality Index in Q3 2005. Here are highlights from the survey results.

Luxury Hotels (90) received the highest scores for the average of all food and beverage questions. Scores for food and beverage were slightly lower for Upscale Casino Hotels (86) and Upper Upscale Hotels (83).

In the hotel restaurant category the top-scoring brand was The Ritz-Carlton followed closely by W Hotels. Ritz Carlton guests were wowed by their experiences saying, “The restaurants were absolutely wonderful,” and “above and beyond my already high expectations.”

Among casino hotels, Bellagio was ranked first for the quality of their restaurants. Guests raved that Bellagio’s Picasso restaurant provided “an incredible French-Mediterranean menu” and an atmosphere that “made us feel we were in a Mediterranean village.”

The hotel brands delivering the best room service (speed and quality) included Four Seasons Hotels, Intercontinental, and Loews Hotels respectively. Bellagio’s room service was tops among casino hotels.

What is your favorite hotel bar? By a large margin, people are raving more about the bars found in W Hotels. Customers described the W’s XYZ Bars as a “glamorous cocktail lounge for an upscale crowd” whose popularity “squeezes people very close together so that meeting people is easy.” Intercontinental also received high scores for its lounges from its comparatively older clientele.

How important is food and beverage service?

Historically hotel restaurants (and other food & beverage services) were provided simply to maintain a standard of guest service, even if they did not show a profit. Today, hotel food and beverage departments can be very successful and contribute to hotel profitability. For this study, we examined the role of food & beverage services and their impact on guest loyalty.

Restaurants. The results showed that for some segments (e.g., economy) simply providing a restaurant (and not necessarily a good restaurant) can positively affect hotel loyalty. For these guests having an exceptional restaurant had no additional positive impact on hotel loyalty. For other segments (e.g., Midscale, Extended Stay) hotel guest loyalty was affected with a quality restaurant that exceeded customers' expectations.

Room Service. For economy and extended stay guests offering room service is important. These guests, however, did not value exceptional room service with increased loyalty. Conversely, a high quality in-room dining experience does influence the loyalty behavior of guests staying at Midscale and Upscale Casino.

Bars. The importance of the bar is more significant for Luxury and Upscale Casinos than for the other industry segments. However, a better-quality hotel bar does affect the loyalty behavior of Midscale and Extended Stay guests.

Overall, loyalty club members and guests who paid higher rates tended to rate their food and beverage experiences higher than other guests. For more information about this study, please contact Market Metrix.

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The Market Metrix Hospitality Index is a quarterly report of customer satisfaction with hotel, airline and car rental companies based on 35,000 in-depth consumer interviews. It ranks top hospitality brands by industry and, for hotels, by categories such as luxury, midprice and economy. Reports are available by subscription.

Jonathan Barsky and Lenny Nash work for Market Metrix LLC ( MarketMetrix.com), a firm that provides customer and employee programs for the hospitality industry. For more information, call (800) 239-7515.