For most hotel awards, specialist committees or juries decide which hotels should receive the award. That’s not the case with the International Guest Certified Hotel Award. This award lets guests highlight ‘oases of hospitality’ for other guests. This approach makes sense: after all, it’s guests that should feel at home in hotels. The International Guest Certified Service Accreditation and the International Guest Certified Hotel Award are given out based on feedback from genuine guests.
All the organisational matters, such as implementing the guest’s-eye-view perceptions, analysing guest service quality feedback, creating the Quarterly Report for participating hotels, and, last but not least, awarding the IGC Service Accreditation and the International Guest Certified Hotel Award, are handled by the ‘International Guest Certified Organisation for Hospitality Quality’, or ‘IGC’ for short.
The IGC was founded in 2004 by Ortwin Oberhauser. Ortwin comes from a family of hoteliers based in Bregenz, Austria. He is a graduate Bachelor in applied Computer Science and the CEO of bobdo, an international film production company with an integrated full-service digital advertising agency in Austria (Bregenz on Lake Constance). As a certified Google Premier Partner agency, bobdo specialises in strategic video marketing, web development and Google marketing. The firm has an international team, and bobdo is leading IGC into the digital age with resounding success.
Its global focus means that IGC is operated from several countries, and is headquartered in Thailand, a country that has been dubbed the ‘land of smiles’ due to its unique hospitality.