What is important to hospitality venue patrons?

What is important to hospitality venue patrons?

In a Victorian survey patrons of licensed venues were asked, amongst other things, to rank venue facilities in order of importance. Some of the rankings might surprise.

When it comes to knowing what facilities are most important to your customers you generally have a pretty good idea. However, a survey of Victorian Hotel patrons showed something of surprise at the top of the list.

Patrons ranked Security as the 3rd most important facility for a venue. 

This probably should not be a great surprise but it is a fact that almost remains hidden – it certainly doesn’t receive the attention it merits.

The survey was conducted by Shinewing Australia and On Tap Hospitality for AHA (Vic). Their report – Hospitality Insights: What makes lincesed hotels successful? – opens with 3 key insights, the very first one being:

“Patrons Care Most about:

    1. Staff and service quality.
    2. Dining experiences – especially the 35-54 age bracket.
    3. Security and safety.”

This insight comes from patrons being asked to rate the importance of each aspect/facility at venues. The scores were normalised so that the most important facility gets a score of 100 and the others scored in comparison to that. The following graph shows the result.

Different groups of customers placed a high importance of different aspects of a venue’s offering. Although both Gaming and F&B rated Staff & Service Quality as MOST IMPORTANT, they had differing perspectives on what else was important to them:

F&B PATRONS place a high importance on …

  • Entertainment (eg live bands),
  • Socialising with friends & family

GAMING PATRONS place a high importance on …

  • Security & Safety
  • Amenities and ease of transport.

This high level of importance patrons hold for security has is well known at Exact Security. After all, a company offering customer focused security services should have a good understanding of what is important to customers.

Indeed we have plenty of practical experience that clearly demonstrates the potential impact of the attitude to security by venue management. In brief …

If the attitude of the venue matches the expectations of customers, it is likely the venue will be acquiring new customers. If it doesn’t match, the venue will struggle to retain existing customers.

Two venues A & B, within a 10 minute drive of each other, both have a strong gaming focus.

Venue A has recently (in the past 12 months) moved to have a much higher security profile and a visibly strong presence.

Venue B has been continuously focused on reducing security costs and this has led to a substantial reduction in their security profile.

With Venue A looking and feeling more secure, it has become considerably more attractive to gaming customers. They are capturing a number fo these customers from Venue B.

Venue A consciously adopted this position, they planned to used security as a point of difference for the very reasons outlined in this Hospitality Insights Report – you can view the entire report by clicking on the image below.

Hospitality Insights