Principles of Marketing

The management of the hotel wants to know the opinions of his guests on what facilities he needs to improve and so he can find out what type of customers use his hotel.

The research method employed was that of focus groups and questionnaires.

Focus groups are small groups selected from border population and interviewed through facilitator-led discussions, for opinions and emotional responses about a particular subject. Focus groups are a common market research tool. Results are qualitative and are not statistically significant. Focus groups are a somewhat informal technique that can help you assess guest’s needs and feelings. In the case of the kings hotel this would be appropriate for gathering the right information because they find out the type of customer and there opinion, e.g. a businessman might want facilities like a gym and a sauna for him to keep fit and relax whereas a father of kids might want an area for his kids to play and be safe. The other research method was a questionnaire. The success of a questionnaire depends to a large extent upon the quality of the questionnaire. Questions should be designed so that the answers allow respondents to be classified into required subgroups of the universe or population.

Initial questions usually seek personal facts about the respondent, such as marital status, age group and occupation. Some of these questions may be designed to stimulate the interviewee’s interest in the questionnaire and create an impression that the persons contribution is important for the research. Questions of a more deeply personal nature, required to identify subgroups in terms of income and spending habits, can follow later when the respondent has become more relaxed.

I feel that this research method is effective because it gathers all the relevant questions he wants answered such as the type of customer that visits his hotel and the sort of facilities they would like to see. Both methods will give him the right information he was looking to get answered to an extent.

Bad questionnaires are misleading and likely to yield meaningless data, so an awareness of the techniques of a questionnaires design is essential to hotel manager wanting to establish opinions on his hotel. Many problems can arise if a questionnaire is not designed properly The most frequent errors in questionnaires are questions which don't quite mean what the researcher intended, questions which don't probe to find out what the respondent really meant, long and complicated questions, questions which repeat what has already been asked, questions which don't allow the respondent to answer in a way which is relevant, questions which are inappropriate to the research method, bad routing which leaves the interviewer wondering which question to ask next, or worse, routing to the wrong one, too