LQA Standards: How to Succeed in Luxury Hospitality With LQA Audits

“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?

Luxury Quality Assurance (LQA) standards are a comprehensive set of criteria designed to evaluate and ensure the quality of service and operational excellence in luxury hotels. These standards focus on various aspects of hotel management and guest experience, encompassing both quantitative and qualitative measures.

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.

Benefits of Adhering to LQA Hotel Standards

Adhering to LQA hotel standards offers numerous benefits that significantly enhance a hotel’s operational effectiveness, reputation, and guest satisfaction.

• Increased Prestige: Meeting LQA standards can elevate a hotel’s status within the luxury segment, making it more appealing to discerning guests.
• Brand Integrity: Consistent application of LQA standards helps maintain a uniform brand experience across all locations, which is essential for large hotel groups. This consistency safeguards the brand’s reputation and ensures that every guest receives a high-quality experience, regardless of the property they visit.
• Exceptional Guest Experiences: The comprehensive criteria set forth by LQA focus on all aspects of guest interactions—from front office services to food and beverage quality. By emphasizing emotional intelligence and personalized service, hotels can create memorable experiences that resonate with guests.
• Direct Correlation with Profitability: Satisfied guests are more likely to return and recommend the hotel to others, leading to higher occupancy rates and revenue
• Actionable Insights: LQA audits provide detailed feedback on various operational aspects, allowing hotels to identify areas for improvement. This helps in optimizing performance and ensuring that high standards are consistently met across all departments.
• Access to Comprehensive Data: Hotels adhering to LQA standards benefit from access to an extensive benchmarking database based on thousands of assessments. This allows them to compare their performance against other luxury hotels, providing valuable insights into industry trends and best practices.
• Real-Time Reporting: Utilizing tools like hotel inspection apps enables real-time reporting and scoring, which helps in maintaining high standards without the administrative burden typically associated with quality assurance processes.

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.

LQA Hotel Standards Criteria

According to the LQA group, there are 8 criteria against which a hotel’s performance is evaluated:

1. Service Excellence:  Service excellence is the cornerstone of guest satisfaction. It includes 238 specific standards that assess how well staff meet guest needs, provide personalized service, and maintain consistent hospitality standards.
2. Product: The product criterion refers to the physical attributes of the hotel, including its facilities, amenities, and overall environment. With 180 standards in this category, hotels are assessed on aspects such as maintenance, accessibility, security, and innovation.
3. Emotional Intelligence: Emotional intelligence highlights the human aspect of service, where staff demonstrates empathy, adaptability, and cultural sensitivity. With up to 272 standards assessing staff’s ability to connect with customers, it is an important criterion of LQA standards.
4. Efficiency: This LQA standards criterion evaluates how well a hotel streamlines its processes to minimize wait times and maximize service delivery. With 151 standards, it encompasses various operational aspects such as check-in/check-out procedures, housekeeping efficiency, and food service speed.
5. Cleanliness: Cleanliness is a fundamental expectation for any hospitality establishment. LQA standards include 69 specific guidelines that focus on maintaining a clean and hygienic environment throughout the hotel. This includes guest rooms, public areas, dining facilities, and restrooms.
6. Food Quality: Food quality plays a crucial role in the guest experience, influencing perceptions of luxury and care in service. LQA assesses food quality through 54 standards that cover culinary excellence in terms of taste, presentation, variety, and sourcing practices.
7. Sales Opportunity: This criterion focuses on a hotel’s ability to identify and capitalize on sales opportunities without compromising guest experience. With 25 specific standards, it evaluates how proactively staff can offer upgrades or additional services that enhance the stay while generating additional revenue for the hotel.
8. Sustainability: Sustainability has become increasingly important in the hospitality sector as consumers become more environmentally conscious. LQA includes 62 standards related to sustainable practices within hotels.

How to Prepare for an LQA Audit?

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 Leading Quality Assurance 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”.

Challenges in Maintaining LQA Standards

Maintaining LQA standards presents several challenges for hotels, particularly due to the rigorous and comprehensive nature of these criteria. Here are five significant challenges:

• Extensive Criteria: LQA standards encompass over 800 specific benchmarks across various departments, including service excellence, cleanliness, and product quality. This complexity can overwhelm staff and management, making it difficult to ensure compliance consistently across all areas of operation.
• Continuous Training Needs: To meet LQA standards effectively, hotels must invest in ongoing training programs for staff. This requirement can be resource-intensive and may lead to inconsistent service delivery if training is not regularly updated or if staff turnover is high.
• Operational Variability: For hotel chains with multiple locations, maintaining uniform quality can be particularly challenging. Differences in management practices, staffing levels, and local market conditions can lead to varying guest experiences, undermining the brand’s overall reputation.
• Cultural Barriers: Implementing new protocols or technologies aimed at elevating service standards may encounter resistance from staff who are accustomed to existing practices. This resistance can hinder the adoption of necessary changes that align with LQA expectations.

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.

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 Standards Checklists

With the help of LQA standards, you will be able to elevate your luxury standards further and exceed the expectations of your guests. On top of all that, with GoAudits, you can get started right away. Check out our template library for LQA hotel standards PDF templates 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
• Hotel Housekeeping & Room Cleaning Checklists
• Hotel Maintenance Checklists
• Hotel Inspection Checklist
• Hotel General Manager Checklist

Through internal LQA 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.