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Welcome to Travel Buddy
In this episode, join Switchfly's Ariella Barshay and Ian Andersen to explore what truly makes a customer experience unforgettable. Together, they unpack the art of 5-star moments, the role of thoughtful personalization, and the delicate balance between technology and human touch in service. With stories from the front lines of hotels and practical insights on empathy and communication, this conversation reveals how the smallest details can create lifelong loyalty. Tune in for actionable tips and fresh perspectives that every service professional can use to wow their guests.
Transcript
Brandon Giella (00:02.159)
What is a five-star customer experience moment?
Ariella Barshay (00:07.57)
I would say it's a moment that leaves someone telling other people about it. You know, it's really hard to have someone talk about something great that happened to them. Everyone is much more eager to say, I didn't like this or I didn't like that. But a five star moment would really be when someone leaves that experience, that vacation, that flight, that trip.
and they go off and tell other people about how great it was. I highly recommend that service. I highly recommend this hotel. Everyone has to stay there. It was amazing. I'd say that was five-star experience.
Brandon Giella (00:42.139)
Okay, I actually love that because there's a lot of ways to define customer experience and that I have not heard before that simply, but that's a very simple, straightforward thing. If somebody wants to tell about it, that's good. That's exceptional. Okay, I love that. Okay. Tell me of a time where that was the case, where you did that. Can you think of anything that comes to mind?
Ariella Barshay (00:54.332)
Really good, yeah.
Ariella Barshay (01:03.133)
Oh gosh, years ago when I was working at this hotel, that brand was known for customer experiences. We didn't have a budget to make someone happy. So everyone, whether you worked in in-room dining, if you were a houseman, a housekeeper, you worked at the front desk, as long as that guest left happy, then you could spend whatever you need to spend. You could comp their night, you could upgrade them, you could do whatever you wanted.
because them leaving Happy was the most important part. And there was one time I, know, someone was telling me all their issues and we were just having a conversation. And I think they just wanted to vent. And in the end, I was, I just said, you know what? Let me comp your night for you. And they were so unbelievably shocked. They like had nothing else to say. And then they wrote me an email later on and they were like, I just want to let you know you really made our weekend.
told everyone about how great this hotel is. This is where we will be staying in the future. So everything to them, even if it was really minor that they didn't like, you know, it's one little thing after another that just makes for an awful experience. Even if you're flying, the flights delayed. Now you get on the flight. It's taking a while. And then now like, you know, it's just all these little things that just make for a disaster. They just said all of that didn't even matter.
the next time they were in Philadelphia, that's where I am, they would stay with us.
Ian Andersen (02:32.174)
you
Brandon Giella (02:32.283)
I love that. That's such a simple thing. But think of the ROI on that, know, a couple hundred bucks or whatever of a cost. But now you've got free marketing that's worth probably thousands of dollars for that. But you've also got repeat business, which is thousands of more dollars over the lifetime. It's not, it's like the ROI is so easy.
Ariella Barshay (02:47.998)
Yeah, and that was a time, yeah, I'm sorry.
Ian Andersen (02:48.334)
I no, I was just going to say like most companies don't necessarily have an unlimited customer service budget or the plan to like do whatever you possibly can to do it. So maybe like how can you be intentional in creating those moments without
Brandon Giella (03:01.488)
Yeah.
Brandon Giella (03:06.842)
Yeah.
Ian Andersen (03:15.7)
sort of like free range, right? Like how do you set up a process to create those kinds of moments?
Ariella Barshay (03:22.504)
Yeah, it really depends. A lot of my face-to-face contact was when I was working within hotels, so either behind the front desk, in-room dining, within sales. And a lot of it has to do with what that guest, that partner, that customer is telling you. If you're able to read between the lines, they're telling you exactly what they want, what they need. You know, someone's coming in and that question is, what are you here celebrating?
that could either make or break their stay because maybe when they were on the phone, when they booked their reservation, they said, it's my birthday weekend. It's my first time to the city. And those notes never made it into the reservation. So now here I am at the front desk asking them what they're doing here. And that kind of leaves a gap in that customer service aspect of it. But so, you know, if you could tell with that body language, they seem a little unhappy and they're like,
Brandon Giella (04:03.739)
you
Brandon Giella (04:12.283)
Hmm.
Ariella Barshay (04:19.762)
I actually told them when I made the reservation, it was my birthday. And you'd say, I'm so sorry. I must have missed that. I am so happy you're celebrating your birthday with us. I hope you enjoy your stay. I actually upgraded you from a queen to a king. And, you know, it's something like that. It doesn't cost the hotel money if they have the occupancy available, if they have those room types available. And now that person is going to their room being like, wow, I got a free upgrade. Something so little like that.
Brandon Giella (04:21.549)
Yeah.
Brandon Giella (04:45.999)
Hmm.
Ian Andersen (04:47.234)
I think.
That's a really good point that like, customer experience very rarely is like one catastrophic event, right? It's like these little things that build up of like your, you know, it takes a while to get checked in room. takes, you know, like whatever the, the, there's not enough towels or, you know, they're like these little things that
Ariella Barshay (04:59.818)
See you later.
Brandon Giella (05:00.325)
Mm-hmm.
Brandon Giella (05:16.507)
Mm-hmm.
Ian Andersen (05:16.706)
that build up to like an overall bad experience. And it's interesting that you can kind of turn that around by just being a little more intentional and forward thinking about how to deal with the customer.
Brandon Giella (05:29.093)
Mm-hmm.
Ariella Barshay (05:29.428)
So yeah, things, the first time I ever worked behind the front desk and I asked how their travel in was or how their day was so far and they said uneventful. And it took me off guard because I was like, I had to think about it for a second. And that's the best thing that someone could say. There was nothing that made them have a bad taste in their mouth before coming to the hotel. So now I had to make sure that their check-in experience is great or at the restaurant.
Brandon Giella (05:48.249)
Hmm.
Brandon Giella (05:57.243)
you
Ariella Barshay (05:59.102)
we get their order correct, things like that. But the customer always tells you what they want, even if it's not flat out. I'm well and not great. Pay attention, yes.
Brandon Giella (06:02.459)
Hmm.
Brandon Giella (06:08.612)
I like that. Pay attention, pay attention. It can be simple. It doesn't have to be this super big magical thing, but it could be creative too. I want to get your thoughts on this. Last episode, we had talked about this book that I read years ago called The Power of Moments. think it's Chip and Dan Heath. I could be getting that wrong. But one of the things that they talk about in this book, there's this hotel, I believe, if I'm getting my details right, I believe it was in LA. There's a hotel.
and it had a red phone that was an ice cream phone. And so you could pick up and you just pick up and you put in your order for ice cream and it will be delivered to you somewhere in the hotel.
And I love that idea because that's pretty simple. Like it's not this super operationally complex thing. It's a bit of an investment, but it makes this like creative, like unusual thing that people remember. Like that is an easy thing to remember. Like, how was your, how was your stay in LA? And it was like, it was great. You know, the hotel, had this phone that you could get ice cream whenever you want it. And that kind of thing. It's like, it's a cheap thing in a sense.
but it's super memorable and creative. I'm wondering, is there anything like that that comes to mind that's like, okay, doesn't, again, it doesn't have to be this giant operation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Same, yeah.
Ian Andersen (07:21.742)
I could never take my kids there.
Ariella Barshay (07:25.96)
never go to the cream. For sure, if it's a pet friendly hotel. again, I've worked at a few of them. we would have dog beds, dog bowls, dog treats that our chef from the restaurant would make. And if someone came in with their dog, their dog is their child. So they're part of the family. So if they're checking in and you acknowledge their dog, that's, that's it, you know, they love that if you offer treats, think about how
Brandon Giella (07:43.898)
Yes.
Ariella Barshay (07:55.046)
inexpensive a box of treats are and you're just offering them a treat, you're now acknowledging the whole entire family. Hotels that do wine hour. When I was the lead concierge at this one hotel and I would do food holidays. So I'd work with our restaurant team and I would just, you know, Google national food holidays and
Brandon Giella (08:06.596)
Yeah.
Brandon Giella (08:18.703)
Yeah.
Ariella Barshay (08:20.038)
any day that had something really fun, we would have that to give out when people checked in. And we'd say, it's National Skills Day. it's National Gingerbread Cookie Day or something like that. And, you know, we were a hotel that would do wine hour. And so if it was National Margarita Day, we then would also have margaritas or we would give out drink cards so they could go to the restaurant. you know, that's all about different parts of the hotel working together, but even hotels that are not full service like that, again.
Brandon Giella (08:25.198)
That's fun.
Brandon Giella (08:48.474)
Yep.
Ariella Barshay (08:49.01)
If you're pet friendly and you can offer dog treats, that's something so tiny. But my God, an ice cream cone is so cool.
Brandon Giella (08:56.474)
Yeah, I think that's what I want to get across is like when you think about customer experience, to your point, it's something worth telling to someone else. That doesn't have to be this giant.
Ariella Barshay (09:06.174)
Yes.
Brandon Giella (09:09.206)
technological operation. It could be the smallest, simplest thing that takes a little bit of creativity, a little bit of forethought. And it doesn't have to be for hotels or airlines or any kind of loyalty program either. It could be if you're a consulting business. It could be if you're a small business. It could be, you know, a whole range of things, a law firm. And there's just these little moments that you can do that really increase that customer experience for somebody. That's great. Yeah.
Ariella Barshay (09:31.606)
Yeah, you're, creating this human connection with somebody else, in an industry that was based off of human connection. And there's a lot of niches of it, a lot of parts of it that are kind of losing that. So if you are a company that can keep that communication human, you can keep that experience human, you'll go far.
Brandon Giella (09:56.547)
Yeah, that's great. That's great. Yeah, there's more to talk about there. But I wanna shift gears and talk a little bit about personalization. So it's something we talk a lot about on the show, because personalization is everything. mean, the details, know, God is in the details, the devil's in the details. Like getting those things right is so important, but it's hard to do. It can be hard to do. So we talked about a couple of things that...
you know, operationally are not that complex. Maybe an ice cream phone, maybe some dog treats, you know. But then there is at an enterprise level, at a big corporate level, there are some things like getting the booking, you know, the notes and the booking is for my birthday, and it doesn't make it to the front desk. There is some operational complexities and technological complexity in that to personalize some of these moments. That can be quite an investment, can be tricky. And personalization is something that...
folks have been talking about for decades, especially since the era of big data. Personalization has been everywhere. Use that data to personalize everything. But I want to talk a little bit about how you have seen this work well in your experience, either on the tech side, the operations side, and then...
as we are in 2026, we must talk about AI. So I want to hear your thoughts on like how AI does or does not fit into the mix and whether real people are still important, you know? So what are your thoughts on personalization broadly and then bringing that down into, you know, today's era?
Ariella Barshay (11:31.754)
us being a technology company, there's only so much that you can do to make it personal to each customer. We are a SaaS company, so we are providing this software as a service, and overall it has to work for all of our customers. Of course, some of them want something changed, or maybe they want something on a homepage, or maybe they want this. It's not as simple as it should be. It does involve a lot of work. So, know, us as...
Brandon Giella (11:57.678)
Yes.
Ariella Barshay (11:59.274)
a company we need to figure out, is it a benefit to us? Does it make a difference to them, to their customers? Sometimes, you know, they're not the ones that are viewing that homepage. It's, you know, another customer or their customers' customers. So we kind of have to look at that. But personalization is very important because it makes people feel special. Everyone should feel like the big fish in a small pond and
Brandon Giella (12:27.673)
Hmm.
Ariella Barshay (12:28.67)
That's kind of something that I've always kept. So whether I'm speaking with a customer, I have a monthly call, weekly call, they ping me for something, I'm letting them know this, that's what you're bringing to my attention is very important, even if it's something we can't do. Let me see, let me talk to somebody. I wanna make sure this works for you, it works for us. And sometimes in the end, we can do it for them.
Brandon Giella (12:44.547)
Hmm.
Brandon Giella (12:54.181)
That brings to mind there's this company that I like called 37 signals. They built a software called Basecamp and one of the guys says that there are two tokens on the table at any customer service interaction. One of the tokens says it's not a big deal. The other one says it's the end of the world and
whichever one you grab, the customer will take the other one. And I really like that as like a simple, like you take the end of the world thing and you make everything you can do to make it right because then they're forced to grab the, it's not that big a deal, but thank you. know, and so I like that. Okay. So thinking about the, on the, on the tech side, you were mentioning there's a conversation you had recently of, you know, AI versus real people and, and like, what do you think about that?
Ariella Barshay (13:14.698)
and
Ariella Barshay (13:18.634)
Yes.
Ariella Barshay (13:25.31)
Yes, yeah, I like that.
Brandon Giella (13:40.973)
Maybe it's incorrect dualism. Maybe it's a false dichotomy that with, if you push into AI, you'd have to give up the people or, know, how do you think about that, that dimension? Because that's what everybody's asking these days. It's like, okay, what do I do with AI? And, do I still need a call center? Is that important?
Ariella Barshay (13:57.098)
Yes. Yeah. That's a big conversation. you know, uh, there's a lot of potential customers out there, customers that we currently have, um, some partners that want to make sure that their customers, their users get to speak to somebody. And we reiterate, we have a call center. It's 100 % human. They are answering the calls. If you have to email someone you're emailing with us, we're there as support. And it definitely goes hand in hand. mean, having
AI, having a chat bot, having that ability to just quickly, you know, text within an app or on the website. I have a question about this. And then you're given a whole list of, please pick one of these options. Sometimes you just, you just want to speak to a person. You're like, please help me. And the longer it goes on where you can't be helped. And you're kind of given that roundabout that, know, I was already here. The call has dropped. Now you're back. I think that there's a lot of ease.
Brandon Giella (14:39.993)
Yep.
Brandon Giella (14:44.227)
Yeah.
Brandon Giella (14:50.073)
Yes.
Ariella Barshay (14:55.998)
People can breathe when they call a phone number and someone says, thank you so much for calling, how may I help you? They're like, great, I'm being helped.
Brandon Giella (15:01.977)
Yes, yes, yes, yes. I love that. Everybody's been on that phone tree where dial three, if you have X and Y and I get to number seven and it's still not the category of the thing that I'm looking for. I don't know what to press. I want to get off this phone. Yes, yes.
Ariella Barshay (15:16.274)
Yes, just happened the other day and I was like, yeah, I'm like, what do mean I'm out of options? How can I be out of options?
Brandon Giella (15:24.673)
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. So yes, but I understand that obviously the need for routing and categorization and all of that, but not every request is going to fit neatly into a box that you thought about three years ago.
Ariella Barshay (15:36.222)
Mm-hmm.
Ian Andersen (15:36.527)
That's an interesting point though of like you sort of think of customer experience, not just customer support, but as a part of it of like, you you have to set up for the broad stroke, right? Of kind of everybody. Yet you're obviously not going to have the employee base to handle every single potential customer individually.
Brandon Giella (16:01.176)
Right.
course.
Ian Andersen (16:05.184)
So there is a transition point where you're having technology take care of things versus like there is some point at which you're going to have an employee, a human directly handling this event one-on-one. So how do you, where do you set up that transition point? How do you think about that going in? Is it a chat bot on the website that lets you
you know, if you want to talk to somebody, here's a number, is it, you know, like what part of that decision tree do you then break out? And how do you think about that with like staffing, with your text, your text set up, like that's, you know, all sort of part of it, right?
Ariella Barshay (16:54.89)
Well, of course. I mean, with our call center, it's during our contracting process, our potential partners are letting us know these are the hours or this is the time zone that a lot of our customers are in. And then, you know, we're looking at what we already have set up and then we're saying, okay, we can do X, Y, and Z, or this is the potential. You know, last year we were going through that. How many hours do we need to have our call center available?
how many different time zones, how do we make it work? And we need to make sure that someone is always there to answer the phone. That is so important. And I mean, hey, there's a lot of times we all travel and we're so happy we could just be in our app and check into our room on our app. But when you check into your room and they're not hypoallergenic pillows.
I'm going to call down to the front desk and ask for that. I'm not going to go back into the app and chat and then maybe someone will. There's almost a sense of urgency and that's why you want to speak to a human and you want that connection. Whether you're really happy or it's something that you feel like is not satisfactory, you want that person on the other end who's receiving your feelings to acknowledge that in a way. And then you feel like, wow, I have been helped.
Brandon Giella (17:51.449)
Yeah, yes.
Brandon Giella (17:56.985)
Hmm.
Brandon Giella (18:10.936)
I like that. There's this
Ian Andersen (18:12.865)
That's a good point about the empathy of customer support and customer experience that you can't get technologically per se.
Ariella Barshay (18:15.881)
Yeah.
Ariella Barshay (18:20.988)
No, they're they're answers. You know, you're asking a question and maybe that response back is the right answer. And if it's not, you have to ask it in a different way. When you speak to someone on the phone, you're kind of giving them this idea of what you need, what you want, the activities that you're trying to book, what flights, the hotels, any of that. And then they get an idea of what you need, what you want, and then they're helping you.
Brandon Giella (18:46.77)
I want go deeper in that idea about empathy and emotional intelligence because I think for lot of operators and lot of tech forward kind of people that I'm sure a lot of listeners to the show, it's I think, I don't want to say easier, but sometimes it's easier to think about like here's the schematic of the flow of like the customer service.
experience and here's all the tech stack and how data moves from one silo to the other. But there's also like a very human element to this. Like we are
We are emotional creatures. The elephant is the emotion and the reason is the little rider on top that can barely control this thing. What have you learned over the years about empathy and emotional intelligence? Something that may be stuck with you or like a principle or a practice that you have that when somebody comes to you with a request or when you're thinking about hospitality, kind of generally speaking, what's something that...
you wish you knew earlier or that you'd like to say that you think has been really, really helpful in that regard.
Ariella Barshay (19:55.934)
Something that I was told right away was that when you are in front of the customer, whether that's a meeting, whether that is, you you're behind the front desk, the customer is in front of you. If you're a server, a bartender, you're walking throughout the restaurant, making sure everyone has having a great time. Like that is your stage. Like you are there to make sure that everyone is so happy. And if they're not, how can you fix it? Your feelings, your emotions, everything.
you could do that behind closed doors. So sometimes, you know, there were, there might be really tough situations and you can look at your colleague, your manager, a co-worker of yours and just kind of give that eye of like, I need to step away. Like what is happening is too much. And if you have that support, then everyone can help to make sure that the situation is fine. But yeah, being able to know that you're kind of acknowledging the feelings and acting in a way.
Once you step away, you can be your normal self, but you're there to relate in a way to that customer when you are talking to them and making them feel like they are the most important person in the room. Everyone wants to feel that way from the person who maybe had a group on they're using points or someone paid top dollar. Everyone in that room is the most important person.
Brandon Giella (21:17.91)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is super helpful. Yeah, that's exactly how you feel when you walk into a restaurant or you're on an airline. There might be 300 other people on this plane, but I am the important one that you need to pay attention to. It is through my eyes that I see the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not always easy to do. Okay.
Ariella Barshay (21:29.406)
Yes. Yeah, I spent my money on this. I spent my points on this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Brandon Giella (21:38.68)
Okay, so I want to talk more getting into more of the details or the practicality of how this has done well. And so one of the things that we have talked about is like building feedback loops and listening to the customer. So when you think about operations in a loyalty program, rewards program, a hotel program, working at a restaurant, thinking hospitality, and trying to deliver high, high quality client experience, customer experience.
How do you create the kind of feedback loops to listen to the customer deeply and then make it happen and then kind of close that loop? What is that like for you?
Ariella Barshay (22:16.82)
So a lot times it's understanding who on the customer side, where that question is coming from, who brought it to your contacts attention and why is it important to them. And once you understand those questions, then you could say, okay, taking all this, taking this feedback and then I can bring it to the appropriate person here on our team and then they can work on it.
I have kind of always been in that mindset that if a customer tells me something once like, Hey, this is brought to my attention. It was someone important telling them. And that's why they're bringing it to our attention. Now it is a big issue on their side. A lot of times they'll let things slide, you know, okay. They, they wrote customer success or, you know, customer service. they've made a ticket. They did this and that they pinged me about something, but if they reach out and they say, Hey,
Brandon Giella (23:00.812)
you
Ariella Barshay (23:10.01)
I've been told XYZ is happening, this is feedback that they're telling me needs to be fixed right away because it's important on their side. And so if I then bring it to the correct departments on my end and we get it fixed, it makes my contacts life so much easier at their job and the issue at hand is resolved. But it's hard because now you're working with a couple of different teams, you have to do some follow-up.
The last thing you want is for your customer to do a follow-up with you, your contact, and to say, hey, any update on this or do you have any ideas? So kind of setting that expectation. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I should have an answer for you in a couple of days. Or if it's Tuesday, you could say, I should have an answer for you by Friday. And then Friday you could say, I'm still working on it. Kind of setting that expectation. But when they give you feedback, it's because it's important in their eyes.
Brandon Giella (23:43.147)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Yes.
Brandon Giella (23:58.496)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Brandon Giella (24:07.01)
That's helpful. assume, anytime you're hearing about something, assume it's a big deal. Handle it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Ariella Barshay (24:11.338)
Yeah, yeah, it might not be the end of the world, but to them, there is a reason why they're bringing it to your, someone else brought it to their attention. It's now on their plate.
Brandon Giella (24:21.643)
Yeah.
I'm wondering how in a modern business, something I've been thinking about a lot lately is called what I call like a coordination failure or the coordination problem. Because what you have to do is coordinate a lot of information to a lot of people very quickly and make it happen. And I'm wondering how you resolve that. And what I mean is, okay, you get this request and makes it up the chain or through the team, but you've got to get other people involved, other technology apps, you know, whatever there could be a geographic location. It could be from a call center that's, you know, overseas and you've got to
that information and how do you coordinate
information or knowledge or data such that you can resolve things quickly between multiple different partner, you know, departments or teams or because of course you've got your hotel and you've got the kitchen or the wait staff having to do this with the front desk or, know, there's different coordination challenges there. But in a modern tech business or a global enterprise, you've got to coordinate all over the world, different time zones, different technologies. Like how does that, how do you think about that kind of problem?
Ariella Barshay (25:25.864)
It definitely can be tricky, especially if you're here. For me, I'm on the East Coast and if the person that's bringing something to my attention is in India, there is a very big time difference there. So basically acknowledging and knowing, okay, if I was to email them now, it's the overnight for them, but kind of bringing everyone in. So every company is different. They might have a system that...
you can submit a ticket and within the ticket, gets assigned to departments. And then, you know, from there, everyone's working on it. You might have some place where you can create a group chat, different platforms like that. But being able to involve multiple people at once in one place kind of stops that like an email here, a ping here, let me call here and then get all those different answers.
So kind of just bringing everyone in at once and saying, hey, this is what the customer, the partner, the user brought up, has been brought to our attention. Are you seeing this? Can we fix it? When will it be fixed? Or is this something we can add? Things like that.
Brandon Giella (26:36.673)
that's helpful. Bringing everybody together. Getting all on the same page. Alignment. Yeah, it's hard to do. Very hard to do.
Ariella Barshay (26:39.058)
Yes. Yes. Yeah. And sometimes, you know, maybe everyone doesn't need to be brought in right at the beginning, but, you know, there could be times where, you know, you're speaking to two different departments and then you bring someone else in and they're like, I didn't know about this. And then now you're kind of backtracking, telling them about it you're like, okay, so what do you think?
Brandon Giella (26:54.303)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Happened to me this morning.
Brandon Giella (27:00.273)
Mm-hmm. Okay. Okay.
Ian Andersen (27:03.092)
So something we hear lot about kind of on the customer success side of things are things like net promoter or net promoter surveys or scores. Some of those like tools that customer success teams use to measure how they're doing. How do you take information from that?
to improve your team, but also to communicate across the organization because something you've brought up a few different times is that like, it's not just the people dealing face to face with the customer that needs to know some of this stuff. How does that information go out across the organization?
Brandon Giella (27:46.871)
That's right.
Ariella Barshay (27:54.004)
So every company is different. Whether you are like us and we provide a service, we provide this platform, we can let our different teams know this is what's going on. Whether you are a hotel, one of the hotels I worked at, we had customer profiles within the brand. And so just like your loyalty number, your pillow type, things like that are always attached.
So we would go through in the morning, attach people's profiles to the names because a lot of times someone will make a reservation, they won't give their loyalty number, and then they just assume that we would know when they check in we don't, that's a missed opportunity to make sure that someone is happy. So there's a lot of steps behind the fact. But then if you're making a reservation through a third party, a lot of people don't understand you made your reservation with them. It has nothing to do with us at the hotel.
Brandon Giella (28:36.747)
Yeah.
Brandon Giella (28:48.695)
Yeah.
Ariella Barshay (28:51.838)
It has nothing to do with us at that airline. You made it with them. It was their responsibility to give us all of your information. We would have it a lot at checkout as well. Someone would want their bill and we're like, well, you didn't book through us. We don't have your bill. You booked through this third party. And they're like, no, I booked with you. And we're like, no, you booked through this third party. You have to get, we don't know what you paid. All we have is your name. So we don't have any information. And again, those are.
Brandon Giella (29:12.599)
you
Brandon Giella (29:17.407)
Hmm. Interesting.
Ariella Barshay (29:20.19)
Those are missed opportunities, but being able to sync stuff up. Yeah, we had internal, like hotel insider, we had internal profiles between our brands hotels and we would write notes. So if someone stayed at our hotel and had a really bad stay, we would write a note and just say, we tried our best to fix it. These are all the issues that they had. The next time they check in, please make sure they have this pillow type. They have a view, they have this, this and that.
There was one time we were matching profiles while we were looking at who was arriving and we just saw it was like the same issues over and over and over. And we were like, this person likes to get their stay comped. They're doing the same thing at all these different hotels. It's the same issue. If they're having issues, why do they keep staying with us? Why do they keep staying within our brand? Maybe we're not the best brand for them. But then we realized like,
Brandon Giella (30:08.457)
you
Brandon Giella (30:12.534)
Hmm.
Ariella Barshay (30:19.998)
Their stay gets comped every single time. They've learned the system, but we knew now because of the notes.
Brandon Giella (30:23.126)
Hmm. Okay. So the takeaway is my dear listeners, don't get on Ariela's blacklist. You will be having, you will have a bad life. This is not good. Okay. Good to know. Okay. We always know. That's great. Okay. Okay. There is so much to cover here. So as we wrap up, I have one final question for you. If you were
Ariella Barshay (30:35.53)
We always know. We know.
Ian Andersen (30:38.64)
Peace.
Brandon Giella (30:51.67)
queen of the customer experience for all of the land and you had the most important customer experience and loyalty podcast on the planet and you had your opportunity to say the thing that you want to say most to all these people listening. What would you say?
Ariella Barshay (31:11.402)
person that is helping you is so important in making sure that your experience is amazing. Like give them grace, make sure that you are very nice to them because for example, you could have a clean room and it could be a city view. Doesn't mean it's a view of the city. It just means it's a high room. Like we know that. The front desk agents know.
what the views are from all these different rooms and they can make your stay amazing or they could give you the stay that you booked. And all you have to do is just be nice. We are nice too. Whoever you're on the phone with, be nice to them. Everyone's just doing their job.
Brandon Giella (31:58.208)
They're human beings at the end of the day. They may be some poor kid in college just trying to get through school like I was and you get yelled at by somebody and it's like, man, I'm just trying to do my job. I'm trying to help you. I'm just in college. Yeah, yeah. Okay. I got you. I got you. Yes. Yes. I'm trying my best. That's great. Okay.
Ariella Barshay (32:00.328)
Yes.
Ariella Barshay (32:08.456)
does.
Ariella Barshay (32:12.33)
Yes. Yes. I want you to have a great stay too. I'm trying. Yes. Oh, thank you.
Brandon Giella (32:23.144)
Ariella, thank you so much for your expertise and your wisdom. I know you've done this a long time and have so much expertise to share. So thank you for taking the time to share it with us. Ian, it's a pleasure as always. I love talking to you all and learning about how to make a defining experience, a customer experience that is a five star moment. So I hope everybody was able to take away some lessons here and Ariella, I hope to have you back on the show. We'll see you next time.
Ian Andersen (32:49.37)
Thanks, Brandon.
