The Greatest Twitter Hotel Service Story Yet

When a guest tweets a complaint about his or her stay at your hotel, do you ever see it? Do you try getting in touch with the person to apologize?

That’s all well and good, but Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts has set the bar for social media customer service quite a bit higher than that.

When a guest at Four Seasons Resort The Biltmore went on Twitter last month to make a lighthearted complaint about the hotel’s turndown music (”Okay, the turndown music in my room at Four Seasons Biltmore is so not soothing. More appropriate for a funeral or beheading.”), she wasn’t expecting anything to come from it. So imagine her surprise when she returned to her guestroom the next day to find a bottle of wine and a note from the general manager apologizing for the substandard tunes-along with a listing of local radio stations.

Turns out the Toronto-based corporate interactive marketing team behind @FourSeasons saw the tweet and took the time to notify the California resort about the problem. Making the story all the more impressive is that the guest is not identified by name on her Twitter account, meaning the Four Seasons folks had to do a bit of sleuthing to figure out who she was en route to rectifying what was at most a minor nuisance.

(Read the first-person account at HotelChatter.)

I talked with Cherry Kam, Four Seasons’ director of interactive marketing, about the incident. In keeping with the hotel company’s exemplary customer service ethos, she passed it off as all in a days’ work. “That’s what Four Seasons is about: Taking the guest service seriously,” Kam says.

She told me about a similar situation at Four Seasons Hotel Bangkok, when a guest lamented via Twitter that there were no good movies on TV that night. The comment got relayed to the hotel’s management, which then informed the guest about the hotel’s in-house DVD library.

Impressive though it is, Kam remains modest about Four Seasons’ social media effort. There is still plenty of room for improvement, she says. “We need to do a better job. We want to further tweak and refine.”

For example, Kam says there remains some trepidation about the best way to respond to guest queries on Twitter. When possible, @FourSeasons tries to respond via private direct message. She is wary of setting a precedent for social media interaction that is unsustainable long-term.”Once we publicly respond, then all the people expect us to respond publicly, so we need to gauge that,” she says.

As for future social media plans, Four Seasons is “fully committed” to Twitter and Facebook, Kam says, but she is hesitant about branching out too broadly across more networks and letting customer service slack as a result. “Instead of trying to extend ourselves too wide, let’s do something well and continue our engagement,” she says.

Hoteliers, the social media customer service bar has been set. Go out there and top it. (And then tell me about it!)