The Deputy Ministry of Tourism is looking for a company to undertake mystery guest services to evaluate Cyprus hotels, Phileleftheros reported on Wednesday.
According to the Ministry’s preliminary announcement, “services required are the building and implementation of a fully integrated system to evaluate the quality of the services provided in hotel businesses by conducting mystery visits.”
Tenders are to be launched in February and the value of the contract is approximately €300,000.
As per the tender invitation documents the scope of work involves:
a) 87 hotels in Famagusta District, of which six are five-star, totalling 22,770 rooms;
b) 37 hotels in Larnaca District, of which one is five-star, totalling 4,850 rooms;
c) 44 hotels in Limassol District, of which eight are five-star, totalling 10,615 rooms;
d) 30 hotels in Nicosia District, of which one is five-star, totalling 2,980 rooms, and
e) 61 hotels in Paphos District, of which twelve are five-star, totalling 5,760 rooms.
It is also stipulated in the competition criteria that the applicants should have a track record of at least two successfully completed contract undertakings in the last five years of a value of at least €30,000 each. The scope of work of those contracts needs to have been the provision of services related to the development and implementation of an evaluation system of hotel services via the deployment of mystery guests to the relevant businesses, with a minimum participation of 50% on the applicant’s part.
In practice, mystery shopping involves sending out a person to pose as a customer who then takes notes on a business’ quality of service. In tourism, if a hotel or other tourist business is evaluated as “non-satisfactory” in more than 15% of criteria per category, then the business loses points accordingly in the rankings. In such cases, the Ministry will issue a notice to the business’ manager to improve those particular services.
The protocol to be used by the winning bid for its evaluations will be agreed in advance with the Ministry.
