The Wiki Man: Losing track

About a month ago at a conference I was shown an analysis of customer satisfaction surveys from a large hotel in the United States. What emerged from this study was that a guest’s enjoyment and appreciation of almost every aspect of a hotel is coloured by their initial experience of their visit — specifically how fast and easy they had found the business of checking-in. People arriving at a quiet moment who received their room keys in a minute were far more complimentary about every aspect of their stay than those made to wait. Not only did they rate the hotel’s service more highly, but they also believed the food to be tastier, the rooms cleaner, and the gardens more attractive. People made to wait on arrival were more critical about everything.

Devotees of behavioural economics will not be surprised by this discovery, as it shows the workings of something known as ‘confirmation bias’. Having formed a judgment of something, we are alert to anything which corroborates our first impressions and are relatively blind to anything which conflicts. It supports other research suggesting our memories of events are much more determined by how they begin and end than by ‘the stuff in the middle’. (The NHS does itself a disservice here — the stuff in the middle is often good, but the admission and discharge procedures are dreadful.) What has very little effect on our memory of any experience is its duration.

The finding delights me, since it provides scientific justification for a proposal that will, I think, enjoy the support of anyone not employed by the construction industry. Instead of sluicing £25 billion pounds into a high-speed railway line between London and Birmingham, spend 0.1 per cent of this money rebuilding the Euston Arch.