Hotels want to hear customers opinion of your stay. But they no longer feel that it is enough to leave a questionnaire in your guest room and hope for a response, not when TripAdvisor and other public rating sites displaycustomer satisfaction - or dissatisfaction - for all to see.

So they may send guests who have just checked out an email survey asking about their stay, and sometimes an additional email if they do not respond to the first one. And hotels monitor what is being said about them on social media and travel websites.

The data they collect affects both how they treat their guests overall and how they interact with individual travelers.

Customer feedback used to be for internal use only, but as guests increasingly turn to the Web to air their reactions to their stays, hotels view customer satisfaction as even more important to their business as per a New York Times report.

A study from the Center for Hospitality Research at Cornell University recently found that hotels with better customer reviews on travel rating sites like Travelocity and TripAdvisor could charge slightly higher rates. Thomas P. Botts, executive vice president and chief customer officer at Denihan Hospitality Group, said customer satisfaction was so important to his company that a portion of employee compensation was tied to it.

Still, hotels are trying to find the right balance between surveying customers and bothering them. As a result, some questionnaires are now shorter, allowing guests to complete them in a few clicks, and sent to mobile devices to be filled out by customers riding in taxis or waiting at the airport. The Denihan Hospitality Group uses a system created by Posmetrics that rotates five questions on an iPad at the front desk. In the latest Hyatt Hotels post-stay survey, only one question really needs to be answered.

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