A few weeks ago, I did an assignment review of hotel shops. Coyle hotels shops are really a shop unto themselves, so I felt the need for a separate column on this particular shop.
Overview: These shops aren’t for your typical Holiday Inn or Marriot. Rather, hotel shops for Coyle are going to be involving five-star properties. These shops are definitely for experienced hotel shoppers only, and you likely won’t be assigned any until you’ve established a solid track record with Coyle.
Project variations: Read the instructions carefully. Very carefully.
Visit and reporting requirements: Details, details, details. That’s the best way to describe a Coyle hotel shop. If you’re in a single-party consent state, make as much use of your digital voice recorder as possible to help you remember quotes and how the interactions went, as well as dictating notes to yourself. Your report could run as long as 30,000 words–the length of a novella.
Strategies: Hone your skills with other shops that require narrative. Also, as one shopper noted, keep doing their other shops to stay on their radar.
Special note: It is often said on MysteryShopForum.com to be cautious when it comes to shops that are reimbursement. Be sure that you’re comfortable with the possibility of losing your reimbursement in the event your shop is rejected for some reason.
What others have to say: One shopper observed, Coyle “has hotel shops where travel is up closer to $500, and pay is over $100. Just because they are not posted at the moment does not mean they do not exist. That said, you would be getting off easy at 40 interactions and 2 dozen pages for a shop like that. For me it’s usually around 60 pages of narrative [15,000 words, assuming double spaced, 30,000 words single spaced] with close to 1,000 stands that have to be checked. There is a no mysterious hotel shop where you get big money for the report, a hefty travel reimbursement and a simple report to write up. Many of the extensive trips I’ve taken involved ganging up three monstrous hotel reviews and burning my rewards points for a few days off in between each while I worked on the reports.”
Yet another observed, “Assuming you’ve done several other evalutions with Coyle and received high scores, you just keep requesting them. It took 9 months from the first time I requested it to get my first Coyle hotel shop. Meanwhile I continued doing restaurant shops for them, partly to stay on their radar and partly to keep improving my observational skills. I had already done several hotel shops for another MSC before I got my first one with Coyle.”
Estimated pay: Can be reimbursement for travel, as well as room, plus pay on top of that. As stated, don’t expect something that lucrative to be an easy report.
Companies: Coyle Hospitality Group