HOTELS

Jeff Weinstein

Better Way To Get Guest To Reuse Towels?
October 20, 2008

HOTELS’ former Webmaster just sent me an email about an Arizona State University professor’s study on how to better get hotel guests to reuse their towels.

The results are here now, but won’t be available to the public after tomorrow. So take a look now.

Robert Cialdini, Regents’ Professor of Psychology and Marketing, Arizona State University, and a team of colleagues ran a soon-to-be published experiment to see which types of signs would most encourage Arizona hotel visitors to reuse towels. They tested four types of signs:

#1 Cited environmental reasons to encourage visitors to reuse their towels
#2 Said the hotel would donate a portion of laundry savings to an environmental cause
#3 Said the hotel had already given a donation and asked: “Will you please join us?”
#4 Said the majority of guests reused their towels at least once during their stay

Percentage of those who reused towels per request:
Sign #1: 38%
Sign #2: 36%
Sign #3: 46%
Sign #4: 48%

When guests found out that most people who stayed in the same hotel reused their towels, they were more likely to comply with the request.

“What’s most interesting to me,” Cialdini says, “is that the most effective strategy was entirely costless to the hotel. But I’ve never seen it used by any hotel room in any city.”

Sometimes you just have to do a better job of leading the horses to the trough. I am not surprised about the herd mentality winning because it seems to be somewhat human nature: “If they are doing it, we should, too, right?”

I would be curious for a hotelier to give this method a try and report back with the results. Or please let me know if you have found a method even more effective than Professor Cialdini’s.

Posted by Jeff Weinstein on October 20, 2008 | Comments (6)