The Incident Report That Never Gets Written: How Hotels Lose $23,000 Per Undocumented Guest Incident

A guest at a 42-room boutique hotel in Savannah slipped on a wet tile floor near the pool area at 3:15 PM on a Saturday. The afternoon front desk agent saw it happen, helped the guest up, offered ice, and asked if they were okay. The guest said they were fine. The agent went back to the desk. No report was written. No photo was taken. No notation was made in any system.

Eleven months later, the hotel received a letter from an attorney representing that guest. The claim alleged negligent maintenance of the pool area, failure to provide adequate wet floor warnings, and injuries requiring ongoing physical therapy. The damages sought were $185,000.

The hotel’s insurance carrier asked for the incident report. There was none. They asked for photos of the area at the time. There were none. They asked for witness statements. The front desk agent who saw the incident had left the hotel four months earlier. The carrier settled the claim for $67,000 — a number that reflected not the merits of the case but the absence of any documentation to contest it.

The GM told me afterward: “If we had just written it down that day — what happened, what we did, that the guest said she was fine — our insurer said the claim probably would have been denied or settled for under $10,000.”

The Documentation Deficit

The problem is not that hotel staff do not care about incidents. It is that the reporting mechanism — when one exists at all — is designed for a world where the front desk has time to fill out a three-page paper form while simultaneously managing check-ins, phone calls, and the guest standing at the counter asking about restaurant recommendations.

At most independent hotels, the incident reporting process works like this: something happens, the on-duty staff member handles the immediate situation, and then they are supposed to fill out a paper form that lives in a binder behind the front desk. The form asks for date, time, location, description, witness names, and actions taken. It takes 10-15 minutes to complete properly. And it competes for attention with every other task that a front desk agent, housekeeper, or maintenance worker needs to do in a shift.

The result is predictable. Minor incidents — the ones that seem insignificant at the time but become significant when a lawyer gets involved — go unreported. Medium-severity incidents get verbal handoffs between shifts: “By the way, the guest in 214 complained about a broken bathroom lock — I told them we’d fix it tomorrow.” That verbal handoff does not create a record. It does not trigger a maintenance work order. It does not generate a follow-up with the guest. And when the next shift starts, it competes with every other verbal handoff that happened during the transition.

The Three Failures That Cost the Most

Not all incident documentation failures are equal. Three categories account for the vast majority of financial impact:

Slip-and-fall incidents without scene documentation. Slip-and-fall claims are the single most common liability exposure for hotels. When a guest slips, the immediate priority is their wellbeing — which is correct. But the second priority should be documenting the scene: was the floor wet? Was there a wet floor sign? What was the lighting? What shoes was the guest wearing? These details are critical for insurance defense and become unavailable within minutes as the area is cleaned, signs are moved, and conditions change. Hotels that capture scene photos within 15 minutes of a slip-and-fall defend claims at a fraction of the cost of those that do not.

Maintenance-related complaints without work order linkage. A guest reports that the bathroom faucet is leaking. Front desk tells maintenance. Maintenance fixes it — or thinks they do. Two days later, the guest below reports water damage to their belongings. Without a documented chain from initial complaint to work order to resolution to follow-up, the hotel cannot demonstrate that it responded promptly and appropriately. The gap between “we told maintenance” and “here is the time-stamped work order showing response within 45 minutes” is the gap between a defensible claim and an indefensible one.

Noise and security complaints without resolution tracking. A guest calls the front desk about noise from an adjacent room at 11 PM. Front desk calls the noisy room. The noise stops — for an hour. At midnight, it starts again. The guest calls again. A different agent answers and has no record of the previous complaint. The guest feels ignored. By morning, there is a one-star review describing “multiple calls with no action.” If the first complaint had been logged with a timestamp and resolution note, the second agent would have known the context, the response would have been more effective, and the review might never have been written.

The Review Connection Nobody Measures

Incident handling has a direct, measurable impact on online reviews — and therefore on revenue. Cornell Hospitality Research has demonstrated the relationship between review scores and pricing power: a one-point increase in review score correlates with an 11.2% increase in ADR without impacting occupancy.

What most hotels do not measure is the relationship between incident resolution speed and review outcomes. Data from review analysis platforms shows that guests who experience an incident that is resolved within 4 hours leave reviews that are, on average, only 0.3 points lower than guests who experienced no incident. Guests whose incidents take 24 hours or more to resolve leave reviews that are 1.4 points lower. And guests whose incidents are never formally resolved — they just gave up and checked out — leave reviews that are 2.1 points lower and are three times more likely to include specific, detailed negative descriptions.

The difference between a 4-hour resolution and a 24-hour resolution is rarely about the complexity of the fix. It is about whether the incident was captured in a system that creates accountability and visibility, or whether it was passed along verbally and forgotten during a shift change.

The Annual Impact for a 50-Room Property

A 50-room independent hotel at 78% occupancy handles approximately 14,235 room-nights per year. At an average incident rate of 2.3 incidents per 100 room-nights (including minor complaints, maintenance requests, and service failures), that is roughly 327 incidents annually.

If 69% of those incidents go undocumented (the industry average for independent properties), that is 226 incidents per year with no formal record. Most of those will never result in a claim. But the ones that do will cost an average of $23,000 more to resolve than they would have with documentation.

Even at a conservative 2% claim rate on undocumented incidents, that is 4-5 claims per year with inadequate documentation — representing $92,000-$115,000 in incremental settlement costs compared to properly documented incidents.

Add the revenue impact of slower incident resolution on review scores, and the case becomes even more clear. The 50-room property losing 0.3 points on its average review score due to poor incident handling forfeits approximately 3.4% of potential ADR — which on a $140 average rate across 14,235 room-nights translates to roughly $67,800 in annual revenue that the property could have captured with better operational follow-through.

The incident report is not paperwork. It is the cheapest form of insurance a hotel can buy — and the only one that also improves guest satisfaction.