Key Takeaways
- Meeting LQA standards can significantly enhance a hotel’s reputation, customer satisfaction, and competitiveness in the luxury hospitality market.
- Meeting these standards is challenging due to extensive and complex criteria for high quality, emotional intelligence, and personalized service, which demand continuous staff training and meticulous attention.
- A hotel inspection app with features like real-time reporting, customizable LQA checklists, and automated scoring can help you identify areas for improvement, ensure consistent quality, and maintain high standards without the administrative burden or the cost of external consultancies.
“Make guests feel at home while they are away from home” – this is the vision behind every hotel that wants to offer a positive guest experience. However, LQA standards do not apply to a typical hotel guest experience. They are one of the driving forces behind truly memorable luxury hotel operations.
LQA standards are the secret door to practices that focus on sumptuous comfort, personalization, luxury, extravagant choices, and conveniences afforded to guests.
What are the LQA Standards for Hotels?
What is LQA?
LQA stands for Leading Quality Assurance, the global market leader in hotel quality assurance assessments and benchmarking analysis for the luxury hospitality industry. An official document contains predefined LQA inspection checklists measuring 800 quantitative and qualitative hotel standards, specific to each department and area.
Hotels can hire LQA to conduct an external assessment of their standards. LQA inspectors conduct an anonymous on-site 3-day/2-night assessment, measuring all aspects of the guests’ journey. At the end, they provide a comprehensive report with qualitative and quantitative feedback, as well as an exit feedback session with the hotel management team.
The additional value-add of working with LQA is that they provide training and other tools, such as access to an aggregated benchmarking database, based on 25,000+ assessments of individual hotels. This gives hotels confidence and a thorough understanding of how they are situated compared to other luxury hotels.
Why Consider the LQA Standard for Your Hotel?
Luxury hospitality is a growing but competitive segment of the market, with increasing customer expectations and pressure to achieve top ratings.
As Angelo Bonati said: “Luxury is attention to detail, originality, exclusivity, and above all quality.” Offering top-notch facilities and services is a must-have, but it can be difficult to translate it into day-to-day operations.
On the other hand, being recognized as a top-rated hotel by an external body such as the Forbes Travel Guide can bring significant prestige and financial benefits to any property. In that sense, the LQA standard provides a toolkit and actionable insights in order to help you make it to the top of external industry rankings.
Forbes Standards: How luxury hotels prepare for external inspections to unlock top Forbes ratings
What Makes the LQA Hotel Standards So Unique and Different?
To meet the LQA standards, establishments must demonstrate remarkable, unusual characteristics and attain the highest standards in accommodation, service, cuisine, staff, and various amenities. In short, the standard covers all aspects that affect guests’ comfort, convenience and experience, with a core focus on four main areas: front office, food and beverages, housekeeping, and miscellaneous.
What makes LQA standards a truly unique tool for luxury hospitality is how comprehensive and detailed they are. With over 800 criteria, they go above and beyond the 500-odd hotel-specific criteria outlined in Forbes Hotel Standards. Similarly to Forbes, LQA puts emphasis on service and emotional intelligence, particularly hard to measure and achieve.
Connection, personalization, authenticity, and establishing genuine one-on-one relationships will ultimately define the potential of a hotel to meet the LQA standards. All this will be determined with the help of LQA inspections across all hotel areas.
LQA audits are conducted anonymously by external LQA consultants, with a final report covering more than 800 benchmarks, including emotional intelligence and brand-specific standards. The report contains quantitative and qualitative feedback, as well as valuable and actionable insights for each department.
However, these external audits will be typically conducted only once a year, which may not be enough to train your staff and establish daily operational excellence. This means that your teams will need to conduct frequent internal audits and inspections.
Managing brand standards: How digital checklists helped Latour Hotels enforce standards across 30 properties.
LQA Audit: How to Get Ready?
How to ensure consistent excellence year-round, but without cumbersome paper checklists or admin processes? With a simple app, you can make internal audits more manageable and more efficient. Using GoAudits, your staff in different departments can conduct LQA inspections more frequently: on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis.
You will need comprehensive checklists to cover evaluation criteria for each of the areas and departments, including:
- Front of House: Reservations, Arrival/Departure, Check-in and Check-Out, Concierge, Porter/Doorman services
- Housekeeping: Arrival, Turndown, Servicing, Laundry
- Food & Beverage: Restaurant, Buffet, In-Room Dining, Drinks service
- Facilities: Rooms, Public Areas, Fitness & Wellness, Spa
- Other: Guest Security, Transport, Digital Services
These criteria may include some very specific requirements, such as “Answer the phone within 3 rings or 10 seconds with an appropriate greeting” or “Drinks should be served within 5 minutes of the order”. But they can also be subject to interpretation, such as “In front of the guests, the team should collaborate seamlessly to ensure service is organized and professional without being intrusive or repetitive”.
👉 LQA Audit Checklists: To get ready for your official LQA audit, you can find several full-form LQA checklist examples in our template library of audit checklists for hotels.
An Inspection App for Efficient Internal Hotel Audits
Building an internal auditing process can be made much easier and more efficient with an inspection app. With a user-friendly mobile app, quality audits and operational checks can be performed on the go, with scores and corrective actions visible in real time. Elevate standards on a daily basis without too much admin workload.
In addition to LQA checklists, you can also include internal brand compliance checks and Forbes standard checklists in the specific audits of each department. GoAudits offers the advantage of having everything in one location for easy reference:
Some of our clients, such as Rosewood Hotels, Radisson Hotels, and The Luxury Collection by Marriott can confirm the advantages of using the app. As Manon Lott, quality manager at Hôtel de Crillon, A Rosewood Hotel said:
GoAudits helps our teams realise where they need to improve on the standards in order to achieve an excellent level of service. Managers can work on Action Plans using the reports generated by the platform.
Hotel Audit App: How to ensure brand compliance, digitize inspections, and quality assurance using the GoAudits app.
LQA Hotel Audits: Frequency and Best Practices
Leading Quality Assurance LQA checklists allow hotels to conduct frequent internal audits to evaluate their service delivery, enrich guests’ experiences, and improve their overall performance in their locations. Each LQA hotel audit must have a quality score of over 95%.
With the GoAudits Instant Reports feature, you can generate professional and comprehensive reports in real time. You can choose Simple reports, Trends reports or Summary reports that include smart customizable scoring by area/topic, making the LQA inspections easy and fast.
Using the user-friendly GoAudits app for hotel inspections eliminates the need for multiple tools, complex software, or hiring expensive external consultancies. Read more about the benefits of comprehensive reporting in this article: How to track, measure & improve brand standards with a self-auditing app.
Measure and Raise Your LQA Scores
The GoAudits inspection app offers real-time reporting, with reports automatically shared with the relevant parties. Reports can be customized according to your organization’s needs, and smart scoring allows you to measure the overall success of your LQA standards audit.
In this way, you will be able to identify areas that require improvement, taking action immediately to ensure that your guests experience an exceptional stay.
According to the J.D. Power North America Hotel Guest Satisfaction Index Study, a superior guest experience directly translates into increased profits and a better reputation for hoteliers.
The Customer Satisfaction Index Ranking is based on numerical score rates. The company’s first KPI study analyzes the activities that are most likely to positively affect the customer’s experience.
It is not surprising that the Ritz-Carlton Hotel ranked first in the luxury category in the 2022 NAGSI Study. The opportunity to work with such an incredible luxury hotel chain gave us a direct insight into the positive effects that in-house inspections can have on a top brand. It is undeniable that LQA standards play an imperative role in determining performance, revenue, and customer loyalty.
LQA Full Form Checklists
With the help of LQA standards, you will be able to elevate your luxury standards further and exceed the expectations of your guests. And on top of all, with GoAudits, you can get started right away. Check out our template library for LQA full forms and other hotel audit checklists:
- LQA Hotel Food Beverages Audit Checklist
- LQA Hotel Reception Audit Checklist
- LQA Hotel Restaurant Services Checklist
- Hotel LQA Room Dining Audit Checklist
- LQA Hotel Room Audit Checklist
Through internal audits conducted by your own staff using GoAudits, receive instant feedback on each of your properties. Take immediate action based on the reports’ smart scoring feature.
