Lousy Review, Less Pay

Once upon a time, employees would be assessed only by their managers. This was the traditional performance appraisal, an often worthless exercise if, as happened to me on one occasion, it was conducted over a lunch at which the boss, a couple of pre-lunch G&Ts on board followed by a whole bottle of wine to himself, forgot why we were having lunch.

Other systems of appraisal were introduced. There was the upward feedback. Staff could assess the manager, a process which had inherent risks. If Employee A didn't like Manager B, then Manager B could well get a bum assessment. But the purveyors of appraisal systems would insist that these systems would filter out such subjectivity without ever truly convincing everyone that they did, and this was also the case when so-called 360-degree feedback became popular. Anyone could have his or her say. Customers, suppliers, colleagues: they could all have a pop.

These systems weren't of course a free-for-all. Bias was ironed out as much as possible. They wouldn't have been effective or have become as widespread as they did had they just been means of expressing dislike. But they were something of a culture shock for employees or managers who were to discover that there were a number of "stakeholders" whose assessment of performance fell some way short of how the employee or manager would have assessed his or her own performance.

These broader systems of appraisal were all part of a wider culture shock, that of changes to organisations' culture and their ways of doing things. By subjecting personnel to closer scrutiny by these different stakeholders, performance would improve and do so in line with new cultures that were more open to the needs of customers and others.

Into this appraisal mix came technology, and now there is the technology of social media. Customers can have their say like never before, and certain businesses are embracing this customer voice in their assessment of individuals' performance. Comments on Trip Advisor and similar websites are now being used to determine just how much people get paid.

Since the explosion of social media and review and comments' sites in particular, a whole industry of online reputation management has grown up. ReviewPro is one of the leading examples of this monitoring, and its Spanish division works with a whole host of hotel chains. Look at its clients and very familiar names appear: Meliá, Iberostar, Viva and so on.

Meliá is said to be one of the pioneers of using customer comments as part of a quality system through which performance can be measured and remuneration adjusted. Variable pay is partially determined on the basis of these comments; variable pay meaning performance pay, i.e. meeting and exceeding personal and company performance targets. At Meliá, this pay can apparently equate to as much as 20% of overall remuneration, so there is a strong incentive for management to ensure that customer satisfaction is high and also to respond in a thoughtful fashion to any negative comments.

The underlying philosophy is or should be obvious. Customers are at the heart of everything Meliá does, as is the case with any hotel chain. But how well this philosophy is understood by other chains or within Mallorca's tourism industry as a whole is open to some debate. Even among the clients that ReviewPro has, there are individual hotels which are part of certain chains that receive numerous negative comments and little or no response from management.

From surveys that Trip Advisor has done, it has been shown that responding to comments, both negative and positive, is as powerful as the comment itself. Yet, too often there are no responses and when there are they are standard ones issued not by, say, the hotel's director but by someone with a vague public relations job title. 

As with any system of appraisal, using online comments is probably not foolproof. There is greater scope through social media for biased or malicious assessments than there ever was with more traditional appraisal methods. There is also the potential, once it becomes widely known that pay is directly being influenced, for online blackmail, something which does already occur. But then this is something for devisers of systems to take account of.  

In principle, using customer comments is a very good tool for chains to not just monitor management and hotel performance but also to improve it as part of ongoing quality management systems. It should, therefore, be far more widely adopted by the Mallorcan tourism industry which, despite criticisms of standards, is using other methods to improve quality, the SICTED system of quality being one of them.

But there are limits to how useful such a tool is. Many negative comments stem not from poor management at specific hotels but from a lack of investment by chains which leave hotels open to such negativity.

Six Of One, Half A Dozen Of The Other

A few days ago I picked up some poor reviews of Bellevue. In an idle moment I looked again at the website from which those reviews had come, and then looked also at a different website. This is really intriguing. Below, I set out keywords or phrases that appear in these reviews, some of them several times. In both cases, I cite from the six most recent reviews, all of them submitted by people who have been to Bellevue in the past month or so. The first set all come from one site, the second set from the other:

“would not return; dangerous; unsafe; vandalised; uncomfortable; broken down; cockroaches; mosquitoes; foul language; smelly; under-/badly cooked; diarrhoea; disgusting; poor service; feeding time at the zoo; raw sewage; unhelpful; Butlins; stay away”

“brilliant time; friendly and helpful; spacious and clean; open mind and don't believe everything you read; fab; will definitely be going back again; food was good; excellent; highly recommend; cleaned every day; very very good; well worth the money”.

Now, the thing is that all six reviews from the first site criticise heavily; all six from the second praise highly. In the case of the second set, people also didn’t seem to be affected by mosquitoes.

Remarkable that experiences can seemingly vary so markedly.


Quiz: It was of course the KLF, and John Leyton was in “The Great Escape”. No quiz today, but the latest must-hear record to add to Laura Veirs. This one is Kate Walsh, “Your Song” (not the Elton one) from her album “Tim’s House”. Simple, and simply gorgeous. Hear it at www.myspace.com/katewalsh.

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Holiday Hell

You have to be careful. The internet is full of reviews of all manner of things. Some while ago I mentioned the fact that action could be taken against, for example, restaurant owners who post their own glowing reports. That’s one thing. Then there are also the reviews, quite genuine, that slag somewhere off. I don’t doubt the sincerity of many of these. The only thing is that what is awful for one person is good for another. It is amazing how much views can diverge.

I raise this because elsewhere I have read some really scathing reviews of Bellevue from people who have been there this season. They pull no punches. I wonder if anyone at Bellevue takes any notice of this sort of thing. They should.

But you can also find people who are satisfied. Each to their own, I guess.


ETA has called off its truce, placing the Spanish security services on maximum alert. While there are worries about targets such as the America’s Cup in Valencia, a return to terrorist activity could yet cause problems for tourism.

Why this breakdown in the truce?

There is a view that it was simply a ploy to rearm and gear up for a return to activity. Maybe. There is also a political dimension. The Zapatero Government has placed much store in its rapprochement. The national elections are now less than a year away. There had been hope of a Northern Ireland-style end to the conflict.

Not now there isn’t.

Quiz time: Well done to all who got the right answers to our Guest Quiz Inquisitor’s posers. Answers were Blackadder and Jimi Hendrix.
The foxy title? Manfred Mann.
And Alastair puts this very difficult sitcom question. "Can you name any TV series by Carla Lane that was any good?". Phor, that’s a toughy.

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