Hospitality

Service Recovery for Hosts: When Something Goes Wrong

By Jillian MoodSeptember 21, 20266 min read

Chess table set for a game beside a window onto the forest at the Southborough home

Sooner or later a breaker trips in the middle of the birthday dinner, the jacuzzi sulks, or the wifi takes a personal day. The Harvard Business Review's classic on the subject opens with a sentence I find oddly comforting: "Mistakes are a critical part of every service."

The last line of the Mood Promise is written for that day: if something goes wrong, we fix it fast and make it right. Here is the script behind it.

Step one: acknowledge

Reply before you have a solution. A guest with a problem is asking two questions, and "can you fix it" is the second. The first is "is anyone there?"

Airbnb's ground rules for home hosts expect a response within 1 hour, during local daytime hours, when a time-sensitive issue comes up during a stay. On-the-hour answers is a pillar of the Mood Method, and when something is broken I aim for minutes. More on the habit in the one-hour rule.

What the first message does:

Names the problem in the guest's words. "No hot water in the upstairs shower" tells them you read the message properly.
Apologizes once, plainly. "I'm sorry, that is not the stay I promised you."
Skips the defence. The water heater's service history is fascinating to nobody on holiday.
Says what happens next, with a time. Even if the next thing is "I will message you again by 4:15 with a plan."

A hypothetical first reply: "Oh no, I am so sorry about the hot water. That is not OK in a house you came to relax in. I am calling our plumber right now and will message you by 4:15 with a time. In the meantime the downstairs shower runs on a separate tank and is ready to use."

Stephen Tax and Stephen Brown, writing in MIT Sloan Management Review, describe what customers judge in a recovery. One part is fair interaction: politeness, genuine concern, honesty and a clear explanation. That is this step.

Step two: fix

Tax and Brown's second part is fair procedure. Customers expect the business to take responsibility quickly, ideally through the first person they reach, with flexibility for their circumstances and some say in the outcome. For a host, that means:

A time and a trade. "Our HVAC technician will be there between 4 and 5" beats "someone is coming". This is the reason I keep a vendor network of cleaners, handymen, HVAC technicians and landscapers warm before I need them.
A workaround right now. The other shower, space heaters from the closet, the kamado while the gas grill is looked at.
A choice. "Would you like him to come now, or while you are out at dinner?" It is their holiday, so it is their schedule.
A loop-back. An hour after the repair: "Is it holding?"

For our homes near Boston, Montréal or the Eastern Townships, many fixes are simply someone from our vetted local network, in the car, already on the way, while I stay with the guest by message.

Step three: make it right

The third part is a fair outcome. Tax and Brown found customers expect to be compensated for the inconvenience, and they count an apology as part of the package.

My working rules:

Match the gesture to the harm. A small hiccup, fixed fast, earns something personal: a late checkout, pastries from the bakery in town. Losing a feature the guest booked the house for (the jacuzzi on an anniversary trip, say) earns money back.
Offer before they ask. Negotiating for a refund is its own second failure.
Promise only what you will do, then do it the same day. Airbnb's ground rules say hosts should honor their promises to refund or compensate guests in a timely manner.
Keep it on the platform, where both of you have a record.

About that famous paradox

You may have heard of the service recovery paradox: the idea that a guest whose problem was handled beautifully ends up happier than a guest who never had a problem at all. It is a lovely thought, and it gets repeated as settled fact. The research is more careful, and I would rather you had the careful version.

A 2007 meta-analysis in the Journal of Service Research by de Matos, Henrique and Rossi begins by noting that studies of the paradox "produced mixed results". Pooling them, the authors found a positive effect on satisfaction, and no significant effect on repurchase intentions, word of mouth or corporate image. Satisfied in the moment is not the same as coming back.
Michel and Meuter tested it on more than 11,000 bank customer interviews and called the paradox "a rare event", with differences that were statistically significant but "not very large".
Magnini and colleagues, in the Journal of Services Marketing, ran role-play experiments with business students (a limit the authors acknowledge) and found the paradox most likely when the failure is not severe, the customer has had no earlier failure with the firm, the cause looks like a one-off, and the company had little control over it.
And Tax and Brown report the sobering baseline: most customers feel more negative about an organization after going through its recovery process.

My reading, as a host. Recover well because it is right, and because a clumsy recovery stacks a second failure on the first. Do not count on a bonus. Magnini's conditions translate neatly: a storm takes out the power on a first visit, and you arrive with lanterns and a plan, and the guest may well tell that story fondly. A bathroom that was not clean is fully within a host's control, and no gesture turns it into a highlight. And a second problem in the same stay is the hardest thing of all to turn around.

Nobody should plan to be rescued by a paradox. Prevention does the heavy lifting, and recovery is for the days prevention misses.

Which is why the D in the method is maintenance on a schedule rather than on a complaint.

After checkout: close the loop

The stay ends. The failure should not get to come back for the next guest.

Log it. What failed, minutes to acknowledge, time to fix, what you offered.
Find the cause, not the culprit. A dead lock battery is a calendar problem.
Fix the cause before the next arrival, and write the fix into the routine. This is kaizen, the M of the method.
Tell the guest what changed. "Because of your stay, that water heater now gets an annual service" is the best apology there is. Follow-ups like this are part of communicating after the stay.
If the review mentions it, reply with grace: thank them, say what you changed, and stop.

Years in HR and public relations taught me that people remember how they were treated during a problem far longer than they remember the problem. That holds in a house as much as in an office.

Sources

Share this article

Jillian Mood smiling on a sunny deck, holding a tall mug with a moose on it

Want this done for your home?

Everything in this article is part of what Jillian does for the homes she hosts. Tell her about yours and she will tell you, honestly, what she would do with it.

Talk to Jillian Learn the Mood Method