Congratulations! You just returned from your group trip, but your work is not yet done. See these tips on how to evaluate your trip and improve your next one.

After returning home from a trip, take a day to rest. But after that day-off, get back to the grindstone. Even though it is a fun trip, remember: you are providing a service. A major responsibility of offering a service is evaluating your work both internally and externally. Make sure to allow your customers the chance to tell you about their experience, and if for some reason things didn’t go as planned, make sure you do the best to keep your group members through intensive service recovery.

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Internal Evaluation

Remember you are your own worst critic, but this can help you be a better service provider. By going through your trip mentally, you can go over activities and events that worked, didn’t work or need tweaking or tinkering. Experience helps providers get better, because experience allows for growth by learning from mistakes and success. Don’t be too hard on yourself, but learn from things that may have gone wrong, or improve those activities that were a success to help make a good thing great.

External Evaluation

You may not always notice problems, or maybe an activity had much more success that you originally thought. But you can learn these things by offering your group a post-trip evaluation survey. Keep the survey anonymous, so that people don’t feel obligated to be overly polite. Also, using an online survey tool helps make the process simple and convenient for your group members.

In your evaluation, include sections about meals, tours, hotels, shows and transportation, along with an evaluation of yourself and the entire trip. Also, ask them if there is anything they think you should add or omit from your next trip, and ask for comments on specific activities/amenities.

Damage Control With Survey Recovery

Service Recovery is one of the most important responsibilities of a provider. By offering a survey, you give your customers the chance to complain about problems they experienced on your trip directly to you and not their friends or on social media. Consumer Behavior tells us 75-95 percent of all customers that have their complaints remedied in some way will return to your business. Since membership retention is such an important factor in keeping your business successful, make sure you allow for an outlet to receive complaints so you can quickly and effectively remedy them.

With an effective post-trip evaluation, you can help retain your customers and improve your service trip-to-trip. The more information you gain about your service, the more you can polish your packages to offer the best product possible.