It’s been a tough couple of years for the resort industry. The economic downturn severely wounded luxury leisure business, and the AIG Effect nearly crippled the group market. And while the business slump forced many resorts to curtail services and facilities and perhaps levy extra charges, most customers say high-end resorts are still meeting their expectations.

To gauge resort customer sentiment, the HSMAI Resort Best Practices Initiative commissioned a study of resort usage by meeting planners, travel agents and leisure guests. This winter, The Estis Group conducted in-depth phone interviews to determine overall satisfaction with the resort industry and intent to use high-end resorts, especially in light of the economic downturn.

“I half-expected customers would show more push back or be reticent to say they’ve had good experiences because of the service cuts and other things resorts have had to do to survive,” says Cindy Estis Green, architect of the study and managing partner of The Estis Group. “In fact, I got the opposite feedback. Nearly everyone we spoke to raved about his or her experiences. And while they noticed some services weren’t available or were curtailed, it had little or no impact on their overall experience.”

Estis Green believes resorts were able to make cuts in ways that were invisible to guests and didn’t have meaningful effect on customer satisfaction. “These resorts knew they had to be more efficient, but instead of tightening their belts in some random way, they were very strategic in the ways they restructured their service delivery,” she says.

Meeting planners
While most meeting planners are ramping up the number of events they hold, many said future meetings may be shorter, have fewer attendees and be less lavish than in the past. And booking lead times, which shortened considerably in the past two years, are beginning to lengthen.

“A lot of planners said they still need to avoid anything that seems frivolous,” says Estis Green, “so it’s halibut instead of lobster. They may return to booking the same number of meetings [as before the downturn], but it will be a while before meetings are as rich as they once were.”

The study also revealed that meeting planners prefer resort personnel communicate with them electronically rather than using the telephone and traditional print materials, like brochures. Meeting planner pet peeves with resorts included “nickel and diming” guests and lack of responsiveness by sales personnel and lack of attentiveness by on-site service staff.

Leisure guests
While leisure guests use online media to help in booking decisions, it is no more important than it is for meeting planner customers. And, in fact, many potential guests are ambivalent on the value of online customer reviews. “The may read reviews, but they take them with a lot of salt, not just a grain, because they would rather hear about resorts from friends and family because that’s who they trust,” says Estis Green. In years past, families tended to return to the same resorts year after year. Today, they like to try new places and rely on referrals to make their choices. “And while a family may not return to a property, if they like it they’ll tell 10 of their friends and some of them will try the resort.”

An exception, she found, are large groups traveling together—multi-generational families or multiple non-related families—who often will return to the same location every year because it is so difficult to get consensus on a place that satisfies everyone.

“The attitude is, ‘We finally found Kiawah Island and everyone likes it, so we’re not going through the hassle of trying to figure out another place to go for awhile,’” she says.

Travel agents
The study proved again that the reports of the demise of the travel agency business are premature. As the HSMAI study revealed, there is a significant role for travel agents for high-end resorts and the entire leisure side of the hotel business.

“Agents aren’t doing much of the bread-and-butter commercial bookings anymore, but whenever there is a level of complexity in a booking, such as for a resort, there is definitely a role for agents,” says Estis Green. She notes many resort guests have an array of special needs and requests—connecting rooms, tee times, spa appointments, etc.—that are best handled by an agent.

“To be effective, agents need to have relationships at the resorts they’re booking,” she says. “They want a person on-site they can call when things go wrong for their customer or when things need to be changed.”

As Estis Green explains, the online marketing channel has somewhat complicated the resort-travel agent relationship. While most resorts heavily focus their marketing efforts on the Internet, they also need to remember the needs of their travel agent constituency.

“If a resort puts a deal online or offers a package directly to consumers, they must also tell their travel agent customers about the same deals,” she says. “Or, they can produce a template for agents to use to send the same deals to their customers. An agent will block any resort that tries to cut them out, but if a resort is a good partner, they’ll do cartwheels to convince their guests to use that resort.”

The study, “Voice of the Resort Customer,” is one of several produced each year for the HSMAI Resort Best Practices Initiative, a data- and research-sharing service provided to subscribing resorts. More than 30 mostly high-end resorts are in the initiative, which is an outgrowth of HSMAI’s Resort Marketing Special Interest Group.