Customer Experience and Satisfaction Research Across Nakheel's Destination Portfolio
Nakheel needed to understand how visitors perceived and experienced its portfolio of destinations across different points in the year, spanning malls, leisure beaches, and a major tourist attraction. Without structured research, the organization had no reliable way to measure satisfaction, identify experience gaps, or ensure that each destination was delivering on its brand promise. The program needed to capture seasonal variation, requiring two waves of research per destination across high and low season.
challenge
Sarah Lakhani Consulting was engaged to manage the research end-to-end across all destinations. We designed and aligned the research framework and questionnaires for each destination individually, ensuring the metrics captured the specific experience factors relevant to each site. Throughout fieldwork, we actively oversaw and refined execution, introducing adjusted interviewer selection to better match visitor demographics, optimized interview scheduling to capture peak visitor periods, incentives at one location to improve participation rates, and additional metrics at destinations where unique factors required custom evaluation. We reviewed all data for quality and consistency, conducted independent analysis to identify key trends and improvement drivers, and developed individual reports and dashboards for each destination. At the executive level, we produced a one-page dashboard for every destination summarizing satisfaction levels, NPS, CSAT scores, visitor catchment areas, and key issues, designed for the CEO and leadership team to use in strategic meetings.
approach
The research uncovered high-impact insights spanning both operations and brand communications. Operational improvements included enhanced signage and wayfinding, direction on retail and tenant mix at select destinations, and changes to service delivery during peak periods. Brand and communication improvements included refreshed marketing messages, refined audience targeting, and closing the gaps between what destinations were promising and what visitors were actually experiencing on the ground.
results
The program resulted in tangible improvements across all seven destinations, strengthening visitor satisfaction and brand alignment. By transforming customer feedback into specific, prioritized recommendations, Nakheel was equipped to create experiences that more accurately reflected its brand promise across the full destination portfolio.
