How Pest Control Can Help You Retain Lodging Guests

The cost of new customers vs. existing customers

According to Lee Resource Inc., attracting new customers will cost your company five times more than keeping an existing customer. Focusing effort on building relationships with existing customers can pay dividends for your hotel in the future.

How to help retain customers

With this in mind, it's even more important than ever to not lose guest business because of substandard service or room cleanliness. If you've already spent a significant amount of money to attract a guest to your hotel, it simply makes sense to do everything you can to help ensure that nothing unpleasant happens during their stay.

Related > What is Wildlife Exclusion?

Pests can Turn Guests Away

There are many things that can turn a hotel or lodging guest away, hurting your customer retention. One of those turnoffs is a creepy and unsanitary pest. Consider these potential scenarios:

• A guest that you’ve worked to acquire wakes up in his or her hotel room to find itchy, painful welts on their legs from bed bugs.
• A first-time guest to your hotel is admiring your well-appointed lobby when a mouse scurries across the floor, disappearing around the corner.
• A member of your hotel’s guest loyalty program is enjoying their complimentary breakfast when the member notices a cockroach peeking out from the kitchen door.
• Family members visiting your hotel for their annual vacation is chased inside from the pool area by pesky mosquitoes, ruining their much anticipated afternoon in the sun.
• A business meeting group takes a mid-morning coffee break, but they have to fight flies away from their pastries. 

Each of these situations is enough to turn off a hotel guest and send them packing. And, if they stay with one of your competitors next time, you lose the investment you made to acquire that guest. You also run the risk that the displeased guests will share their negative experience online.

The importance of pest control

Here's how each of these scenarios could have turned out differently with the help of a commercial pest control partner:

• Instead of waking up with discomfort in his or her legs, your guest could have woken up thinking about how comfortable your hotel’s bed was and what a good night’s sleep he or she had.
• Instead of worrying about the vanishing rodent, your guest could have been focused on the welcoming first impression of your hotel’s lobby.
• Instead of wondering if that cockroach had contaminated his or her food, your guests could have been enjoying the tasty breakfast.
• Instead of going back inside to escape the mosquitoes, the family could have splashed around in your hotel’s pool for hours, enjoying their break and their time together.
• Instead of swatting flies, your business group could have spent their break planning their next meeting at your hotel.

Bed bugs, rodents, cockroaches, mosquitoes and flies are all common hotel pests that can be treated by commercial pest control professionals. Terminix® specializes in treating hotel properties from guest rooms to kitchens to lobbies and all areas in between. Terminix has trained technicians who understand that pests and bed bugs can damage your property as well as your reputation. In addition to effective treatments, Terminix can also recommend actions your staff can take to help lower your risk of future pest infestations. 

Don’t gamble your guest acquisition costs by rolling the dice with pest control. Play your hand to win repeat business by stacking the deck against pests with a commercial pest control plan. Help ensure that customers return to your hotel, but pests don’t.