Blogs, Insights
Hospitality has never lacked guest data. What it has often lacked is a clear way to know which questions to ask of it.
Guest surveys, online reviews, mystery visits, ratings and benchmarks are now standard across the industry. The infrastructure exists. But when we launched Halo and gave operators the freedom to ask anything they wanted in plain language, something interesting happened.
The questions they asked revealed patterns we hadn't anticipated - patterns that say a great deal about how hospitality leadership is evolving.
The first pattern was linguistic. Operators didn't ask for charts or exports. They asked questions that sounded like conversations with a colleague:
Are we okay this week? Who stood out? What's going wrong? Why is this trending? What should we do next?
This linguistic shift matters more than it might seem. It suggests that the real barrier to using guest data effectively isn't technical capability - it's the friction between how operators naturally think and how traditional systems force them to work.
The second pattern was unexpected: a pronounced focus on people rather than scores.
Operators frequently asked which team members were mentioned by name in guest comments, and how often. They wanted to know who was being praised, who wasn't appearing in feedback at all, and what specific behaviours guests were mentioning.
This pattern suggests something significant: when the friction of accessing insight disappears, managers instinctively look for the human story behind the data. Recognition becomes as operational as reviewing scores.
It represents a shift away from managing averages and towards understanding the specific behaviours that create memorable guest experiences. The question changes from "What's our NPS?" to "What exactly is Sarah doing that keeps appearing in positive comments?"
Operators do ask about NPS, satisfaction scores and other KPIs. But rarely in isolation, and almost never in a purely analytical way.
The pattern we've observed is that KPI queries nearly always come with context: "Why did our NPS drop at the Glasgow site?" or "What's driving satisfaction up in the Southeast region?"
The underlying question is rarely about the metric itself. It's about what the metric is telling them, and whether they need to act.
These contextual health checks reflect how operational leadership actually works. Managers need reassurance, early warnings and clarity - often while juggling a dozen other priorities. A KPI becomes useful not when it's perfectly measured, but when it quickly answers a specific operational concern.
The most common type of request was for a performance summary. Operators consistently asked for strengths, weaknesses and clear overviews.
This highlights a growing need across hospitality: insight must be presented as a story, not a dataset. Managers want something they can use in a team briefing, a regional call or a weekly check-in.
The future of guest experience insight lies in translating complex, multi-source data into consistent narratives that align teams around what matters most.
When performance dips, the questions operators ask reveal a more sophisticated approach than we initially expected.
They're not asking to see individual negative reviews. They're asking about patterns: "What are the most common complaints this month?" "Which issues keep appearing on Tuesdays?" "What themes are emerging in detractor feedback?"
This pattern-seeking behaviour points to something important. Experienced operators know that single data points are noise. They're looking for signals - recurring themes that indicate systemic issues worth addressing. It's a fundamentally proactive approach, focused on early intervention rather than reactive damage control.
Perhaps the most revealing pattern is the frequency of action-oriented questions:
What should we focus on this week? How can we improve wait times? What should I brief the team on tomorrow?
These aren't analytical queries. They're operational planning questions. Operators are treating guest insight as a daily tool for decision-making, not a monthly review exercise.
This reveals an important gap: teams know what guests think and feel, but they need help translating that into specific, coachable actions for the next shift. When that translation can happen instantly, the pace of improvement accelerates.
Taken together, these patterns point to something we hadn't fully appreciated: when you remove the barriers to asking questions, you discover what operators really want to know.
They want to recognise people, not just measure performance. They want to understand causes, not just monitor effects. They want to translate insight into tomorrow's team briefing, not next quarter's strategy.
Halo brings together every source of guest data within The Hub and lets you ask questions in plain language. The most successful operators have always asked good questions. The difference now is how quickly those questions can be answered.
The venues performing best aren't the ones with more data. They're the ones who've closed the gap between collecting insight and actually using it.
And if the questions we're hearing are any indication, that's exactly where the industry wants to go.
