Inghams · Travel & Hospitality
Rapid analysis when every second counts
How Inghams unified feedback across its ski, Lapland and walking brands and turned analysis around inside the critical six-week booking window.
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The survey said four out of five. The comments said otherwise.
A luxury hotel group's guest experience lead sees every comment its guests write, but the survey score couldn't tell them what lay behind it. With Wordnerds, they found what the score had been hiding, and the hotels changed how they work because of it.
Last updated 9 November 2026
At a glance
- A luxury hotel group with hotels in several countries
- A Wordnerds customer since 2025
- Told by the group's guest experience lead
- New listening training, and calls to guests when rooms run late
The challenge
A score for everything that mattered, and no way to see behind it
A luxury hotel's beds, coffee and breakfasts are much like its rivals'. So the group's leaders set out to learn what really makes guests choose its hotels, and the answer was a set of emotional needs guests want met during a stay. One is control, a guest's sense that they are in charge of their own choices and their own time.
The needs now shape how the hotels work. Staff learn them when they join, processes are designed around meeting them, and every new project has to improve at least one. To track them, the group redesigned its guest survey to score each need.
Every survey, online review and internal feedback channel across the hotels comes through the guest experience lead at head office. The survey gave them a number for every need. It didn't give them the in-depth insight they wanted, because a score can't say what's behind it.
The comments could, but guests rarely name the need that was missed. A very upset guest might write that they feel hurt, while a guest with a small disappointment uses more careful language, and the guest experience lead had to read between the lines.
To see behind the score, they measured the same needs in what guests wrote
The guest experience lead taught Wordnerds the group's own definitions, one need at a time.
Behind four out of five, guests were writing about what had gone wrong
In most areas the comments and the survey agreed. In a couple, they didn't. A guest would score their stay four out of five, then write underneath that a late checkout had been refused, or that their room wasn't ready and nobody had let them know. The survey put those areas at about 80%. Wordnerds measured sentiment in those comments at around 60%, sometimes 55%.
The guest experience lead's first thought was that they'd got the themes wrong. They went back to check they hadn't widened them so far that they caught everything. They hadn't. Some guests didn't feel in control of their stay, and some didn't feel their feedback had been listened to as well as it should have been.
When they took it to the hotels, the teams were stunned. These were comments they read every day. With so much feedback arriving, the pattern had slipped past them.
The hotels fixed what the score had been hiding
The group ran a project on each of the two causes.
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Feeling heard: body-language training
Hearing what a guest says isn't the same as making them feel listened to. The group trained its teams in body language, so a guest raising something knows their feedback has landed.
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Control: a call from the hotel
In some hotels, if staff know a room won't be ready, they ring the guest on the way from the airport. The room won't be ready for another 45 minutes, and they wanted to give a heads-up. Often the guest just reroutes, meeting friends first, taking a business meeting or going straight to the restaurant. The call gives them back control.
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Evidence in guests' own words
The guest experience lead now takes the Wordnerds analysis to every hotel, so teams see what guests wrote measured against the needs the business is built on.
What changed
The score's blind spot is now visible, and fewer guests write that they weren't in control
The hotels' surveys scored a couple of areas at about 80%, but Wordnerds measured sentiment in guests' comments at around 60%. The comments showed guests who didn't feel in control or listened to. The luxury hotel group trained staff in listening and, in some hotels, began calling guests when rooms ran late. It has seen far fewer since.
Those were comments about breakfast times that felt too restrictive, or a cocktail a guest couldn't get at the bar. The group hasn't yet put a number on the drop.
Having seen what the comments can show, the guest experience lead wants more of them. The group is thinking about giving written comments more space in its survey, so guests can say how a stay made them feel.
They believe the same idea reaches well beyond luxury hotels. A rail passenger needs to get from A to B, but they might be on their way to a job interview they care about, or a first date. Any business that serves people is meeting an emotional need as well as a practical one, and what customers write shows whether it's being met.
About Wordnerds
Wordnerds turns what customers say into what organisations do. We ingest feedback from surveys, complaints, reviews, calls and social; apply transparent, explainable AI to surface themes and drivers; and serve the insight two ways from one semantic model: full-detail Power BI for analysts, plain-language AI-chat answers for everyone else. Every result traces back to what customers actually wrote, so it's evidence you can act on, not a black box.
Questions CX leaders ask
Why would survey scores and comment sentiment disagree?
A score tells you how a guest rated something, and the comment tells you what happened. At a luxury hotel group, Wordnerds themes agreed with the survey in most areas. In a couple, guests scored about 80% and wrote comments with sentiment closer to 60%, because a stay they rated highly still included a moment where they weren't in control.
How do you find out what a survey score is hiding?
Measure the same things in what customers write, using themes built on your own definitions. A luxury hotel group trained a Wordnerds theme for each of the emotional needs its survey scored, from the written definition and the matching survey question. The themes caught guests describing a refused late checkout or an unannounced late room behind a score of four out of five.
How do you know a theme isn't just catching everything?
Read the comments behind it before you act. A luxury hotel group found that when its Wordnerds themes were widened too far, they blurred together and caught everything, so its guest experience lead kept each one close to its written definition and checked the verbatim behind any surprising result. Only once the theme was confirmed did the group act on the gap.
Can you analyse feedback you've already collected against a new framework?
Yes. When a luxury hotel group built Wordnerds themes for its guests' emotional needs, they ran over all the feedback already in the platform, so results went back well before the themes existed. The group could see whether a pattern was new or had been in its guests' comments all along.
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