What Your Staff Knows That Your Data Doesn’t

You don’t need another dashboard to understand your guest experience.

Your staff already sees where guests get confused, hesitate, and lose confidence.

Repeated questions. Invisible workarounds. Problems that stopped being mentioned.
Those moments are data your systems never capture.

This piece shows how to:

• Spot clarity gaps hiding in everyday conversations
• Capture the fixes your team has already invented
• Turn frontline observations into simple improvements
• Use the “Napkin Test” to surface blind spots quickly

One question to start:

What do guests keep asking that they shouldn’t have to?

What Your Staff Knows That Your Data Doesn’t

It’s 8:47 on a Tuesday, and your front desk person has already answered the same question three times. “Is breakfast included?” Yes. It’s on the website. It’s in the confirmation email. It’s on the sign next to the elevator.

By checkout, your team will have answered that question a dozen more times. They’ll also explain where to find parking, how the key card works, and that yes, the pool is open even though the sign by the gate hasn’t been updated since last season.

Nobody tracks these conversations. Nobody logs them. But they’re the most honest picture of your guest experience you’ll ever get. If you run a 10-room inn, breakfast is a focus group every morning and you already know this.

We looked at destination coordination gaps last weekend. Today, we’re inside your building, looking at the people who absorb guest confusion every day and never get asked what they’ve learned from it.

The Cost of What Goes Unasked

Even at a property where you see most of your guests face-to-face, the things that bother people and the things they actually say out loud are two very different lists. You’ve seen it: the guest squinting at the room number on the door because the font is too small and the hallway lighting doesn’t help. They didn’t complain. They just held their phone up as a flashlight and moved on. But your front desk person saw it happen. They’ve seen it happen a hundred times.

That’s pattern recognition built from hundreds of identical moments. And it lives nowhere in your everyday process.

Here’s where this connects to money. Every time a guest has to ask something that should have been clear before arrival, they lose a small amount of confidence in the experience. That repeated breakfast question isn’t just an annoyance for your team. It’s a signal that somewhere between your website, your OTA listing, and your confirmation email, the message got muddled. And when that confusion makes someone hesitate about coming back, you’ve lost a guest you already had. You’ll spend time and money finding a new one to replace them, and you’ll never connect the two things because nothing in your day links “guest asked a question at the desk” to “guest didn’t return.”

Repeated questions point to information breaks. Those breaks wear down confidence. Confidence is what turns a one-time guest into someone who comes back and tells their friends. You already know how to fix most of these. A clearer email. A better sign. One line added to your booking confirmation. The hard part was never the fix. It was knowing which fix to make first. Your staff already has that answer.

The Question They Answer Three Times a Day

Your team already knows where your information is broken. They know because they keep patching it with their voices.

Is breakfast included? Where do I check out? How does the door lock work? Is there somewhere to store bags after checkout? Where’s the nearest pharmacy?

That question, the one that your staff can answer in their sleep, is a direct signal. Maybe your website says one thing and your booking platform says another. Maybe your welcome message assumes guests know things they have no reason to know. Maybe you updated a policy last year and forgot it still lives on a cached page somewhere.

Ask your team this week: “What’s the one thing guests ask that you wish they already knew?”

Write the answers down. You’ll have a priority list by Friday that costs you nothing but a conversation.

The Workaround Nobody Wrote Down

Your team doesn’t just answer questions. They solve problems you don’t know about.

The hand-drawn map to the nearest ATM taped behind the desk. The sticky note with arrows on the back of a door that guests never see, but the staff replace every few weeks. The WhatsApp message your night manager sends about water pressure in the mornings. The verbal heads-up about the window in Room 3 that sticks unless you lift the handle first.

These fixes exist because your team diagnosed a problem and built a solution on their own. Research on service improvisation found that managers consistently underestimate how much their staff improvises. The part between what you think is happening and what’s actually happening is different from what you’d expect.

Your staff deserves credit for that. But it also means your property is running on fixes stored in individual people’s heads. Not in your systems and management.

Hospitality turns over more staff than any other industry. In the US alone, the statistics put the turnover around 70–75%.

That means the person who figured out your property, who mapped all the quirks and built all the patches, might not be here next season. And replacing them isn’t cheap. The cost is $5,864 per new hire, according to research. But that’s just the recruiting and training side. It doesn’t account for what walked out the door with them.

Ask yourself how much of what your best person knows is written down anywhere. The co-host, the concierge, the front desk person, the property manager. The answer is never enough. You’re not just losing a team member when someone leaves. You’re losing a map of your property that took months to draw.

The best time to look at this is right after a busy time, high season or a holiday, when the patterns are fresh. Ask: “What’s something you do for guests that isn’t in any handbook?” That 15-minute conversation could save you from rebuilding knowledge you already have.

The Thing They Stopped Mentioning

At some point, your staff will stop telling you about certain problems. Not because the problems went away. Because they decided nothing would change.

The breakfast host stopped mentioning that guests keep asking for an item you don’t carry. The housekeeper stopped flagging the broken ice maker. The maintenance guy stopped bringing up the issues with the hot tub. He brought it up twice, nothing happened.

You can see it in how they handle things now. They work around the issue instead of raising it. The workaround becomes the job, and the original problem disappears from view.

Most of the time, it happens because you were busy. The fix seemed too small to prioritize, or the conversation happened at a bad moment and slipped through. Sometimes the issue is six months old. Sometimes longer. That doesn’t mean it’s too late to reopen.

Start by closing one loop. Follow up on one thing someone mentioned and show them what changed. “You told me guests keep asking about early check-in. I added a line to the confirmation email.” That’s it. One closed loop tells your team their observations go somewhere. Even if the backlog is long, one small follow-through changes the signal.

The goal isn’t to fix everything they raise. It’s to make sure they keep raising things.

The Napkin Test

You asked the questions. You surfaced the workarounds. You started hearing from your staff again. Now you have a pile of observations and no system for sorting them.

You don’t need a system. You need a napkin.

The Napkin Test is a simple sorting exercise. You take everything your staff told you and group it into three columns: information problems, design problems, and expectation problems. Each column points to a different kind of fix, and the exercise shows you which category is costing you the most.

Here’s how the three columns work:

‍Information problems. The guest didn’t know something they should have known before they arrived. Fix: update a webpage, rewrite a confirmation email, add a line to the pre-arrival message. Fast. Cheap. Visible to your team.

Design problems. Something about the physical space, the process, or the timing creates confusion. The signage. The check-in flow. The way the key cards or lock-boxes work. These take longer, but they explain patterns you’ve been seeing for months.

Expectation problems. The guest expected something your listing or your OTA profile promised, and reality didn’t match. These cost you the most in trust, and your team spotted them long before a review did.

It reveals things your team has been working around so long that nobody thinks of them as problems anymore. The napkin makes them visible again.

Start with information problems. They’re the fastest to fix, and fixing them sends your staff a clear message: we’re listening. That message compounds.

The napkin gives you the picture. If you want to organize it further, paste your staff’s answers into any AI tool with these instructionst:

I run a [type of property, e.g., 12-room boutique hotel, 3-unit vacation rental] in [location]. This week I asked my staff two questions. Their answers are below.

Question 1: “What’s the one thing guests ask that you wish they already knew?” Answers: [paste here]

Question 2: “What’s something you do for guests that isn’t in any handbook?” Answers: [paste here]

First, sort every answer into one of three categories: information problems, design problems, expectation problems. Then label each fix as: content update, process change, or bigger project. Finally, pick the single highest-priority item in each category and explain why it should be first. Format the output as three grouped lists. Write it for someone who runs the property, not a consultant.

You’ll get back a pattern map of your property built from the people who know it best. No subscription required.

What Gets Lost When Nobody Asks

Your guest experience doesn’t live in your PMS or reservation calendar. It doesn’t live in your review scores. It lives in the conversations your staff has every day with the guests staying at your property.

Those conversations fade with every shift change, every resignation, every busy week where nobody had time to compare notes. In an industry where three out of four team members may be gone within a year, waiting to capture what they know is the same as choosing to lose it.

The tools can wait. The dashboard can wait. Start with the people who are already in the building, already watching, already solving problems you haven’t seen yet.

Most people who run hotels, rentals, and guesthouses don’t lack insight. They lack a moment to hear it.

One question. One conversation. One napkin.

That’s the cheapest, fastest upgrade to your guest experience that nobody is selling you. Not because it isn’t valuable. Because it doesn’t fit neatly into a dashboard.

If you run a small property and spend your days solving problems no dashboard sees, this is where we think out loud about those problems.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How do I find out what’s confusing my guests without running a survey?

Ask your staff one question: “What’s the one thing guests ask that you wish they already knew?” The answers will show you exactly where your website, confirmation emails, and signage are falling short. Most of those fixes cost nothing and can be done in a day.

What is the Napkin Test for hotels?

The Napkin Test is a sorting exercise where you take your staff’s observations about guest confusion and group them into three columns: information problems (the guest didn’t know something), design problems (the space or process created confusion), and expectation problems (what was promised didn’t match reality). It shows you what to fix first and what kind of fix each issue needs.

How much does it cost when experienced hotel staff leave?

Research puts the direct cost at roughly $5,864 per front-line hire. But the real cost is the knowledge that leaves with them. Close to half of what an experienced team member knows about your property, your guests, and your workarounds is never written down or shared with anyone else. When they go, that map of how your property actually runs goes with them.

How do I get my team to share what they know about guests?

Start by closing one loop. Follow up on something a team member mentioned and show them what you changed because of it. That single follow-through tells your staff their observations matter. The goal isn’t to build a reporting system. It’s to create a habit where your team knows that when they raise something, it goes somewhere.

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