Apple announced yesterday Apple Business Connect, a way for business owners to control their information across Apple Maps, Wallet, Siri, Messages, and more. Business Connect allows the same amount of control as Google Business but offers more integration across all Apple devices. For hotels, it will also offer the opportunity for users to make reservations directly and see special offers for the hotel, restaurant, or other aspect of the hotel.

Get Started

It is easy to get started with Apple Business Connect. Enrolment is through the link and is connected to your Apple ID. If you do not have an Apple ID, you will be able to create one. You will be able to add additional users at a later step.

After signing in, you will be asked to locate your business on Apple Maps. Maps has been populating the business information over time. For hotels, it has been pulling the information from TripAdvisor and Yelp. If your hotel is listed on either of those sites, there should not be a problem locating the hotel.

After agreeing to the terms of service, you will be asked to verify the hotel listing. The easiest way to do this is by Apple calling the hotel and providing a code over the phone. The other option is sending Apple documents which will delay the listing being verified. The verification process is important because without it, you will not be able to upload pictures or change any other information.

The Hotel Listing

The listing for the hotel is going to be fairly basic. The logo and cover image are images that can be modified. The call and website buttons will link to the information you provide (i.e. the phone number could go to a reservations desk rather than the front desk). The Book button gives you two options, TripAdvisor or Booking.com.

This is going to be one of the main differences with the Apple Business listing compared to Google Business listings. With Google, users have the option to check availability and make a reservation directly at the hotel. Maybe that will change for Apple Business in the future.

Modifying the Listing

The listing has a few areas that are able to be changed:

• cover image and logo
• basic description (only 100 characters)
• photos
• amenities
• and other basic information (hours, address, phone number, website)

The photos have to be above a certain minimum size and have a maximum size set. Businesses are only able to upload 100 photos. The full list of size restrictions is found here, Apple Business Connect photo standards.

With the photos, businesses will be able to add a short caption and alt-text for each image. Right now, there is no way to modify the order of the images, so that is something to consider when adding the photos.

Apple is verifying every photo to make sure it is up to their quality standards and does not break any of their rules (harmful language, spammy, discriminatory language, etc).

The one area I was not able to explore was Showcases. From the Apple News release:

Showcases, a new feature in the place card, helps businesses present customers with offers and incentives, like seasonal menu items, product discounts, and more. Businesses can easily update the Showcase section of their place card through Business Connect. Showcases are available to businesses in the US beginning today, and will be available to businesses globally in coming months.

Apple News Release

Overall, I think Apple Business Connect is a quality start to offering more control over the listings that were already available on Apple Maps and other products. I am looking forward to see how Showcases can be used, and what other enhancements Apple will be making with the product in the coming years.

The post How to Start Using Apple Business Connect for Your Hotel appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.

It’s that time of year once again to start reviewing your hotel’s performance last year and prepare for 2020. With the holiday decorations put away, let’s put some more attention to the various aspects of the hotel to see where you things can improve. The first in this series is:

Reputation

Online reputation is an incredibly important factor to look at with how well the hotel is performing. The revenues may have risen, but there may be problems showing up in reviews that need to be addressed before things get worse for the hotel. The main site to focus on is TripAdvisor, but also pay special attention to the main 3rd party OTAs your hotel uses (i.e. Booking.com, Expedia, etc.) Don’t ignore Google reviews, which can be managed through their Google My Business site or app.

Each site allows you to respond to guest reviews. Go through the reviews on each site and ensure each one has a response. While it is easy to copy and paste responses in when responding to these reviews, do keep in mind that people are going to read through several reviews to get an idea of what the hotel experience is like. Copy and pasted reviews are a sign of laziness and may not touch on the reviewer’s concerns.

Read through the reviews and make sure there aren’t any major issues that have gone missed. Also take note of anything that could be improved upon that keeps coming up (i.e. lack of luggage carts, coffee service in lobby, rooms too hot/cold.) If team members are mentioned or departments, make sure they get acknowledged at the hotel (posted up in the staff room, sent to staff email accounts, Facebook groups, etc.)

Increasing Reviews

Another thing to notice is how many reviews you are receiving versus the competition. Larger hotels may be receiving more reviews than your hotel, but it is still worthwhile to compare your operation to theirs. It is helpful to read through the competition’s reviews to see what areas you could capitalize on. Maybe all the other hotels lack a service that you could implement easily or better yet, you already have it and you can highlight it more in your marketing materials.

In order to increase reviews, there are some options. One of the more effective ways I have found is by using a service like Guestfolio which has a built in survey that can be pushed through to TripAdvisor. The major benefit to this is the guest doesn’t have to visit TripAdvisor themselves. They fill in the quick survey and submit, which allows the hotel to see exactly who is submitting the review and not leave it to a guessing game.

TripAdvisor Review Express is a similar service with a few differences. The first major difference is it is free, while GuestFolio is a paid service. TripAdvisor Review Express also does not integrate with hotel’s PMS like GuestFolio can. GuestFolio is automated emails, whereas Review Express requires you to sign in, upload a CSV file of email addresses, and then send. That will be fine depending on how busy you are and how well you remember to send the emails. When I used the service, I had a habit of exporting the email addresses on the weekend rather than daily.

The final option is to invite people to leave reviews on TripAdvisor by sending emails upon checkout, either manually or automated through your CRS. The more automated the better as front desk agents can get busy and forgetful during the checkout process. Using a CRS like Vizergy allows the confirmation, pre-arrival, and post-stay emails to be sent right away without having to rely on someone to remember.

Any of these options will work well and I do suggest you use one if you aren’t currently.

Further Reading and Resources

There are other factors to be aware of when it comes to reputation management. A great resouce to consider is Mention, a reputation management company. They have a blog full of useful articles like this one, How to Succeed in Reputation Management for Hotels.

GuestFlip is another service like Mention focused on reputation management. On their blog is this helpful article, Create a winning strategy for responding to hotel reviews on TripAdvisor. It brings up some good strategies to consider when writing your responses to the reviews.

Hopefully the above resources will offer some more ideas to consider while you plan to increase your hotel’s reputation. If you would like direct assistance with developing a plan or would like someone to take on the role of responding to your reviews, get in touch and let’s start a conversation.

The post Hotel Review and Planning for 2020: Reputation appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.

I’ve written previously about the importance of Owning Your Guests. My preferred service to use and suggest to others has been GuestFolio. In short, it allows you to craft various emails to send to all your guests pre and post-stay or during their stay. Provide them with information about airport shuttle times or the weather, and ask them to fill out a survey afterwards, and so forth.

Some property management systems allow you to do this as well, mainly cloud-based ones like WebRezPro. GuestFolio integrates with so many PMS’s that it’s become a leader in communicating with your guests and helping hotels increase their revenues.

All this leads to an email I received from TripAdvisor earlier this week with the subject, “Please Respond By March 2.” Opening the email up told me they had a survey to fill out about possible new features for TripAdvisor.

The survey was very short, and this is what it had laid out:

TripAdvisor New Features

For each of the questions, TripAdvisor asked you how willing you would be to use a service that offered each concept. If you selected “Extremely Likely” or close to it, you were asked to specify prices that you would consider to be fair, too expensive, or too cheap. 

Interestingly, most of the features they’ve listed are very similar to what GuestFolio offers their clients. The one thing that GuestFolio doesn’t do currently is allow communications through a messaging app or texting. There are other apps that allow this, such as TrustYou.

Right now, all of those options are more powerful than what TripAdvisor is proposing, but it is definitely a service to keep your eyes on in the coming months. 

The post TripAdvisor Working On GuestFolio and TrustYou Competitor appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.

An article by Tambourine came across my feed today discussing the merits of live chat modules on hotel websites, titled Want More Bookings Get Chatty. They listed four very good reasons as to why a hotel should consider installing the live chat module, but failed to give any options. There are a lot of options available, it turns out. I will focus primarily on one, mainly because I enjoyed the default look of it without taking too much time to customize it.

Live chat modules, if unfamiliar with them, are a window that pops up on a website, allowing someone to chat through text with a support person on the other end. They are becoming more and more common, especially on websites that are looking to sell their services and businesses that have busy support systems (i.e. phone or cable companies.) They are unobtrusive and will disappear after a short time if they aren’t being used.

The best part about the chat modules is they are simple to use, both for the user and for the admin person. A user only needs to enter their name and start typing away. All of the chat modules I looked at can be installed on a website in a few minutes without too much effort. After installation, the admin person(s) can communicate with the guests through the website or through mobile apps on their phones. Some of the chat modules even offered desktop applications to make things even easier.

Pricing varied with the services: free to $200+ a month. The core features are always available on the lower-tiered plans. The limits placed on the tiers generally have to do with how many users the site has, and how many chat sessions can occur per month.

As mentioned previously, there are lots of options available online. Here are a few to get started with your exploration:

• Olark – 1 user with unlimited chats is $15/month.
• LiveChat – 1 user starts at $16/month.
• Tawk – Completely free. Unlimited chats, unlimited users.
• PureChat – Free for 15 chats, $15/month for 3 users and unlimited chats.

All of them offer the same basic functionality:
– web chat interface for users and admin
– customization for the look of the chat window
– chat history
– triggers for when the pop-up occurs, which pages it’s displayed on
– multipe users
– mobile apps to communicate while on the go

I will run through some of these features with PureChat.

Setup

Setup of PureChat is quite simple. You sign up for an account, get a snippet of code and then paste it into the header of your website or on individual pages. It was painless and installed within minutes.

Next was running through all the basics of the chat experience. This would include the words on top of the boxes, colours, location of it on the webpage (bottom right is the default), and what kind of animation to have the chat window first appear or disappear. When the window first opens, you have additional options, like whether you want people to enter a name or email address, or how you greet the people automatically. There are options for what happens when someone closes the window: download a transcript or have it emailed, rate the admin person, and have a button to direct them to a different part of your website. There are additional options for what happens when the admin person is unavailable. The default is to give the person the option to send a quick email.

Next you setup your users: name, email address, and their level of access. When the users first sign in, they will have to choose a password. They can also set a different profile picture.

The last step to get started is downloading their mobile app for your phone, and logging in with your credentials you used when first signing up.

Depending on how thorough you are in wanting to change all the default actions, setup can take from 5 to 20 minutes.

Chatting

The chatting experience is rather self-explanatory. There is nothing too fancy about it because it is designed for quick sessions to ask for help. There is no video conferencing, file attachments, audio communication, and so forth. Only text.

There are a few things of note for the admin users. Most of these services will allow for a canned response, a message prepared in advance that you find yourself sending out often. This will be rather handy for hotels that have to send out their cancellation policies or directions to the hotel frequently. You can setup as many canned responses as you like, and can set limits on who can use them if need be.

The other nice feature are the transcripts of the conversations. It will include the full converation for review if you want to see how your agents are responding, the agent involved, time stamps, and also an optional rating on what the customer thought of the conversation. Transcripts can be downloaded or emailed from the site, but can be automatically emailed to someone for review, which is useful at the start when usage may be the lowest.

If you happen to have a spammer messaging you, you can also ban their IP address and prevent them from messaging in the future.

Mobile Apps

Mobile apps are available for iOS and Android. They offer quite a bit of functionality for the user: access to chats, transcripts, canned responses, other team members, and scheduling.

Scheduling can happen on the site, but can be set for the users individually. That will be nice if you want a morning shift to respond during their hours, and then the evening shift takes over. Another nice touch is the ability to manually override your scheduling and turn off your availability.

For PureChat, the app is minimal and functional, exactly what you would expect to be using.

Integrations

All of these chatting modules integrate with other sites and services to offer more functionality. Depending on what else you use for your hotel, this may be useful. The information collected from the chatters can be sent to MailChimp to invite them to join your newsletter, or it can be sent to Google Analytics to track where people are visiting from, and more.

Most of these applications will also offer multilanguage support. Very useful for hotels located in major centres with international travellers.

Overall, these chat modules are easy enough to install and use that there is no reason for a hotel not to be using them. It will save guests from calling the hotel to ask questions and keep them in the booking process until the reservation is finalized. It will also offer one more amenity that your competition likely has not introduced yet. It is only a matter of time before they start including the chat interfaces on their sites, so get a jump start on them and start looking into one today.

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Hotels are almost always full of stories to share given the number of people that pass through its doors and spend time there. The hotels I’ve worked with have had their share of bad guests and one hotel had its exterior walls shot several times. This is by far the craziest story I have read that involves a hotel:

Stunning video released Monday shows an angry man ramming his pickup truck through the lobby and into the front desk of an Oklahoma hotel as two women dive for safety at the last second.

John Edward Parsley, 62, of Gonzalez, Texas, was held on $1 million bond Monday night in the Woods County Jail on two felony counts of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and one count of malicious injury to property valued at more than $1,000, according to court records.

According to the incident report, Parsley was angered because his credit card was declined twice at the hotel and he had to pay cash, the newspaper reported.

Christian, the manager, told investigators that “Parsley stated it wasn’t his first bad experience with a hotel manager who was also Indian,” according to the incident report. It said Parsley then told the staff that he was going to “run his truck over them and the property.”

Full story:  Disgruntled Guest Rams Truck Into Oklahoma Hotel Desk, Just Missing Two Women 

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During the latest webinar from InnQuest that was discussing their new booking engine, Webbook, they also touched on the topic of guest management. More specifically, they talked about owning your guests and keeping the guests booking directly at the hotel, not booking through another channel like Expedia. 

A part of their discussion touched on TripAdvisor and how dangerous that site is becoming. With TripAdvisor Connect Instant Booking, TripAdvisor is now an online travel agency, not just a booking portal to help redirect guests to your hotel. They take ownership of the guest information, encourage people to use their site to making reservations, and do not place any emphasis on booking your specific hotel, but any hotel in the destination you are searching for. During the webinar, they put emphasis on removing any mention of TripAdvisor on your site or in your emails to keep potential guests on your site.

That is a difficult decision to make considering how many people actively use TripAdvisor as a research tool when picking a hotel or other activities to do. It is a vicious cycle where you want your ratings on TripAdvisor to be higher to encourage more people to visit your hotel site, and in order to do that, you need your guests to visit TripAdvisor to leave a review. Without promoting TripAdvisor, you miss out on the ratings boost and potential guests. I am on the fence about whether hotels should go to that extreme. 

What I am in agreement with is encouraging your guests to keep returning to book at your hotel again. I mentioned previously about two systems that can help you with guest management, CheckMate and Guest Folio. Here are some other ideas to keep ownership of your guests without spending money (though, both CheckMate and Guest Folio are rather affordable for any hotel operation.)

Discounts

Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) all charge a hefty commission in order to use their services. Expedia charges between 25-30%, Booking.com is 15%, and TripAdvisor Connect Instant Booking is charging 12-15% depending on how much you wish to have your site promoted there. The TripAdvisor percentage does not include their annual subscription services, which can be a few thousand dollars to. On top of the commissions, your CRS (InnLink, SynXis, TravelClick) will likely be charging a fee to have those reservations sent directly to your PMS. It all adds up. 

The fee I put in is likely less than what it is, but it helps show how much is lost to a booking on those sites.

Offering a discount on your website will encourage people to book directly with you instead of an OTA. The price shoppers will be comparing your RACK rate to the online discount and make the smart choice right away. The OTAs that compare rates to keep the hotels in parity will not be able to distinguish the difference either without looking at your site directly. That search would take them too long to do. 

The side benefit of offering a 10-15% rate discount is you make more money than when people book at the OTAs. Once they book directly at the hotel, they will likely skip over the process of price shopping the next time and book directly with you. 

Length of Stay Discounts

Another discount you can offer guests is based on the data you have on hand through your PMS. Encouraging guests to stay longer will cut down on your costs, because it is cheaper to rent out a room that is a stayover for a night versus a full checkout room. Labour is part of the equation and is likely half the time spent on a stayover compared to a full checkout room. The other costs are the laundry, the expendable amenities (soaps, shampoo bottles, etc.), and other small costs through the Front Desk that add up. 

Offering a 20% discount for a guest that stays a 4th or 5th night will help earn you more money by selling the room, and save money by cutting down on costs. The number of nights may vary with your property and should be dependent on the reservation analysis you do at your hotel. Most PMS systems should have the ability to extract the data that show you how many nights guests stay at the hotel. The majority will likely be 1 or 2 nights, but watch for when the nightly stays trail off by a larger margin. 

If your property is more of a resort, offering discounts for a week or longer may be more beneficial. A steeper discount could be made up with extra sales in the spa services or dining establishments, resort fees, and more. The property may even make more money with the discounted rooms with the extra revenue that can be generated. 

Book Direct Specials

Modern CRS services offer the ability to include add-ons to help add value to the reservations before they reach the hotel- dinner reservations, flowers, discounts on spa services, and so forth. All of that encourages people to book at the hotel, but not necessarily book through your online booking portal. 

Offering free add-ons that enhance their stay, but are not available through the Front Desk once they arrive at the hotel, are a great way to encourage people to book through your website. Some ideas are included in the image above, but here are some others:

• extended checkout without penalty
• early checkin without penalty
• receive the WiFi password via email prior to checkin
• priority seating on a airport shuttle bus
• free arrival cocktail in the restaurant/bar or free coffee
• express checkout with receipt handed under the door or delivered by email
• mini-travel guide delivered by email

Some of these options may have triggered other ideas in your mind. Feel free to leave them below for others to think about using.

These add-ons could also be grouped into different broad categories to make it easier for people to choose from. For example, a Business Package could include the WiFi password, early checkin, express checkout, and a free hour in the meeting room. A Leisure Package could include the WiFi password, free cocktail drink, and mini-travel guide delivered by email. Making the choices easier for a potential guest will make the booking process less stressful and more enjoyable, which increases the likelihood of them returning to book at the hotel through the website. 

Surveys

Surveys are an item that have been discussed before here (Improving Your Hotel Ranking on TripAdvisor), but it bears mentioning again. 

Offering a more localized survey will allow guests to be more expressive in their responses by knowing they won’t become public without their permission. They will be able to offer suggestions about the restaurant, or note issues in the rooms that may have not been reported while at the hotel. By being polite and offering suggestions in a private manner, hotel management should be more appreciative that the problems were not escalated to the point where the guest is demanding refunds and concessions for future stays. 

They are simple to setup through SurveyMonkey or through Google Forms. Services like GuestFolio make the process even simpler by sending the surveys out automatically, and collecting the responses in a neat dashboard. 

These services will allow management to reach out to guests in a private manner to respond to their issues and make the guest feel happier. 

The above are merely suggestions in how a hotel can start to rebuild a relationship with a guest and take ownership over them to prevent them from booking the hotel through a more expensive booking portal, or switching hotels completely. The offerings to enhance their stay will build guest loyalty without the use of expensive loyalty programs. With guests being more loyal to your hotel, and by booking directly with you, guest satisfaction and revenues will only begin to climb. 

The post How to Own Your Hotel Guest appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.

Hotels of all sizes face a new challenge with interacting with their guests and building a sense of loyalty between them and the hotels. New businesses like AirBnB make the booking experience more fun by keeping it simple in a light-hearted, professional manner. They also allow guests to interact with the hosts of their stay in a more convenient manner: mainly by using the mobile app to create a nearly instantaneous connection with them.

Hotels now have software solutions to help bridge that gap to make them more competitive with the newer startups. The best option that I have found is GuestFolio with CheckMate being an alternative.

Both help prepare the guest for their stay, and allows the hotel to followup after the guests have checked out to build some brand loyalty between the individual and the hotel. It also offer the hotels many opportunities to up-sell to the guests in order to gain more revenue. GuestFolio operates through a private web portal for the hotel, with more of a longterm focus on the guest; CheckMate offers a different experience by using an app to communicate with guests.

GuestFolio

GuestFolio is a suite of applications all tied together under one dashboard. They offer five different applications:

1. Guest Profiles
2. Transactional Emails
3. Mobile Hotel Concierge
4. Guest Surveys
5. Newsletters

Guest Profiles

The guest profiles are really well done. GuestFolio pulls in guest information from the property management system and attaches that profile to any reservation found under that name automatically. Most property management systems do this already, but with GuestFolio, all guests will have quick access to all future and past reservations pulled in from GuestFolio. That makes it possible for them to refer to a past reservation by its confirmation number in order to receive a folio printout instead of being too broad with their request and having the front desk agents have to search more for the folio. GuestFolio also pulls in their social media profiles to help give you more information about who your guests are before they arrive. This could be extremely useful for smaller boutique hotels which have more flexibility in how they cater their services to their guests.

Transactional Emails

Property management systems already have the ability to send confirmation emails, pre-arrival letters, and post-stay emails. With GuestFolio, these messages become more flexible in their usage. You can separate your guests in any number of ways and cater your messages to those specific guests’ needs. For example, provide your VIP and corporate guests the WiFi password before they arrive or send guests staying your suites instructions for the jacuzzis, and so forth. The number of options available to build your email rules and templates are nearly endless. It is a very powerful feature when the time is taken to build up the templates and rules for your property. In addition, all the emails are mobile-ready, which increases the engagement level with the guest.

Mobile Hotel Concierge

The concierge options are where guests and hotels will get the most value. Hotels can create options for room upgrades, adding different packages onto the reservation, provide dining information, and more. Guests will be able to view special events at the hotel or the area, making dinner reservations, see what kinds of activities can be done around the hotel, and more. Guests will be able to plan their stay, before they stay at the hotel. It is a very useful feature and guests will love it, as long as the hotel takes the time to make everything as thorough and up-to-date as possible.

Guest Surveys

Guest surveys are incredibly important for hotels to send out to their guests. GuestFolio makes this very easy for hotels to do, with the added bonus of including the survey responses on TripAdvisor automatically, which helps boost your ratings on the site. The surveys can be as detailed or as simple as you would, with options appearing depending on how they fill out the survey (i.e. they only see the options to respond about the restaurant if they selected that they ate there.) Hotels can receive survey responses as they happen or in a digest form on a weekly/monthly basis. GuestFolio also keeps track of your survey responses in the dashboard so you can keep tabs on how well your hotel is performing.

Newsletters

Having all that information about your guests becomes very useful when you start working with the newsletter section of GuestFolio. You divide up your guests in any way you like to tailor your message to them directly. Send locals within your state or province a special deal, or send a specialized thank you note to your more regular guests who have stayed more than five times in a year, or send a thank you message in another language for guests from a particular country. GuestFolio also has a great design tool, Studio, which was designed for the hospitality industry specifically.

On the GuestFolio website, you can see examples of the dashboard, and samples of the various emails being sent out from other hotels around the world.

CheckMate

UPDATE

TrustYou acquired CheckMate back in 2016. Please visit their website for more information.

CheckMate is designed to be more useful in the days prior to the arrival date and used during the stay. It is a dashboard to allow communication between the guest and Front Desk agent via email, text message, or the CheckMate app. For Front Desk agents, they communicate through the web under individual profiles.

Similar to GuestFolio, CheckMate also pulls in the social data from other sites to build a more complex guest profile, helping the Front Desk discover specific needs and VIPs before their arrival at the hotel. It also helps the guests choose room upgrades and other services at the hotel through special offers. They also get to decide the primary method of communication with the hotel easily to keep the message thread in one location, not bouncing between email and the app to find a particular message.

CheckMate has simplified their survey system to make the interaction faster and smoother, similar to the five star system used by Uber for their taxi service. Some properties may find that more useful than GuestFolio’s more extensive survey system. One feature with surveys that is a default is all guests receive a short survey the day after they check-in to ensure everything is going well. This helps put out a fire before things flare up and the guest leaves a negative review on TripAdvisor. One key difference between CheckMate and GuestFolio is that CheckMate does not seem to have the same interaction with TripAdvisor that GuestFolio offers. TripAdvisor reviews can be pulled in to help build a guest profile, but survey responses are not shared to TripAdvisor.

Both systems are solid in their integration with a hotel’s property management system with dozens of partners working with them. GuestFolio is more for power users who like being able to segment their hotel to smaller numbers of people to help their overall marketing strategy. CheckMate is a simpler system to help strengthen the relationship between the guests and front desk. Both are valuable systems to have and I would encourage everyone to reach out to watch a live demo of each of them in action to see what the systems offer.

GuestFolio

CheckMate

Images taken from GuestFolio and CheckMate’s websites.

The post Connect with Guests Better By Using A Hotel Concierge System: GuestFolio or CheckMate appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.

A revenue culture spans the teams responsible for driving your hotel’s bottom line. Revenue management, marketing, e-commerce, and sales share revenue considerations at every level of their strategy.

Flip.to – RevPAR Hacking

I recently came across Flip.to’s website and read through a brief and interesting ebook discussing methods that hotels can apply to hack their RevPAR. It discusses strategies and methods to help the marketing and revenue management teams come together, unite under a clear strategy to build revenues. It also discusses the merits in giving front desk teams more flexibility in how they operate with guests to resolve problems.

It is a free ebook and well worth the fifteen minutes it takes to read through. One of the areas they discuss is something that has been brought up on this blog in the past:

A common problem for many hotels is that while focusing entirely on generating demand and shifting market share, post-stay outreach falls at. There’s quite a bit of potential future revenue in maintaining a connection with guests after their departure.

One of the main client hotels has been using GuestFolio to manage its connection with guests from the moment they reserve to after they check out. The engagement level with the guests and the emails they are receiving are quite high. It has been one of the primary reasons why that hotel has had its revenues increase by over 10% this past year- discovering problems in procedures, enhancing different services, and maintaining a positive guest relationship.

To read more about the philosophy behind guest relations, you can read this post on this site: Staying Organized: The Importance of a CRM for a Motel or Bed and Breakfast

Go download RevPAR Hacking from their website to help build your hotel’s revenues.

The post How Hotels Can Hack Their RevPAR to Improve Revenues appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.

Patrick Landman wrote a short list of ways to Improve your Hotel Review Score and Ranking on TripAdvisor which highlights a few points to consider when developing your marketing plan. He left out a few tools that can be used by hospitality professionals that will help drive your score and ranking up in significant ways.

Review Express

One of the easiest and most cost-effecient ways to improve the number of reviews you are receiving is to directly solicit the reviews from your guests. Patrick suggested WiFi landing pages and post-stay emails, which are both great ideas. TripAdvisor created Review Express to take it to the next level.

Review Express allows hotels to enter in a list of email addresses and have emails sent out to the guests with a short HTML form that allows them to review the hotel from within the email. The information gets pushed out to your TripAdvisor profile, publishing the review and increasing your numbers magically. There is very little effort for the guests since they don’t need to visit the website directly and worry about signing up for an account.

The policy I implemented at one hotel was sending out this email every week for the previous 7 day’s guests. TripAdvisor scans the email list (I exported the emails from roomMaster easily into a CSV file, then converted into Excel) to double check for duplicate entries, and then sends the email within 12 hours of you submitting the email list.

The results were rather staggering with how many reviews we actually received. The hotel nearly doubled the number of reviews being entered onto TripAdvisor and maintained its number one position for full service hotel (currently ranked number two overall to a small, remote lodge with only three cabins.) The results with TripAdvisor Review Express were great, but we wanted to take it further and switched to a different service.

Guestfolio

Guestfolio is a fully featured CRM (customer relationship management) system that is quite powerful. It acts as a mobile concierge, providing information to guests before their arrival (restaurant information, activities, room upgrades), but also handles emails to guests: confirmation emails, surveys, newsletters, and more. I will focus on the survey portion today.

Guestfolio works by integrating with your property management system to pull out the guest information directly without any exporting/importing being done by a manager or Front Desk member. It also pulls the information out immediately after a reservation is made, regardless of the source (online, phone direct, walk-in), which is how it can be incredibly useful for confirmation emails. With the survey emails, you have full control over the design of the survey. Everything from what is asked, to what kind of answers you would like back (ratings of 1-10 or check boxes), is all within your grasp.

Apart from designing the survey, you also get to specify the email being sent and when it is being sent (immediately after check-out, a few days later, etc.) After finishing the survey, guests have the option of sending their responses to TripAdvisor without much trouble. The hotels get the double benefit of having a more informed survey response, and a public boost for their TripAdvisor ranking.

The one hotel that has implemented this has been receiving the same number of TripAdvisor reviews as with the Review Express, but double the number of surveys overall with lots of feedback of the overall operation. The responses have been quite useful in giving positive feedback about our Front Desk staff members by name, and also noting minor problems directly to us without publishing a lower ranking on TripAdvisor.

Guestfolio is a paid service, so I would suggest hotels ask for a demo directly of the dashboard and the services provided before committing. It is a great investment and the hotel’s guests have been quite appreciative of the service, as well. It is one of the hidden amenities that guests love to discover that helps separate the hotel from its competition.

SurveyMonkey

If you are looking to gain the same kind of information that the Guestfolio surveys would provide you, at a more affordable price, you can create surveys using SurveyMonkey at low prices. Their basic service is free, with the caveat being you are limited to 100 total responses. Not exactly great for a guest satisfaction survey. The monthly plans that allow for full customization and unlimited responses start at under $30/month CAD. The full customization includes adding your logo to the survey, exporting the data, full support, and more.

I have created a demo survey on SurveyMonkey to give you an idea of how it looks and functions: Demo Hotel Survey.

If you have other ideas on how to improve your TripAdvisor ranking, feel free to leave a comment below.

The post Improving Your Hotel Rank on TripAdvisor appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.

I recommend all owners at least explore the possibility of having a vacation rental video in their marketing portfolio. Please, whatever you do, don’t invest in one of those slideshows that has photos whizzing in from outer space or messages disintegrating into mist. A slideshow displaying different photos of your property does not constitute a video: even if it has music or voiceovers. A video is an actual video. One that communicates space and personality and ambiance. Ask to see your videographers portfolio before signing up. And don’t think of videos as your first two-piece suit. Rather, a compliment to that.

Matt Landau, Videos are for Winners

Matt is a smart guy. I have mentioned him previously in a post about The Value of Professional Photographs for Hotel Websites in which he tested how the quality of photographs effected overall bookings. In his latest post, he talks about the value of videos for promoting the vacation rental, but it also works for properties of all sizes.

Videos are becoming more common on hotel websites, but it is extremely important that they are done as a professioanl. It will help you control the viewing experience that potential guests have when watching the video. What I mean by this is that if a promotional video is a minute long, but starts off a bit choppy or uninteresting, people are more likely to click forward on the video, perhaps missing parts you wanted them to see.

The other reason why hotels should consider including a video on their website and cross-posting on YouTube, is because people are seeking out these videos more and more. For example, yvr2002rtw is a user on YouTube who posts only videos of hotel rooms and luxury airline services. He has over 60 videos posted, and over 600,000 views. That’s an absolutely staggering amount for videos that aren’t popular music videos or comedic events gone viral.

The problem with his videos, which becomes quickly evident after watching several in a row, is that they are a bit disjointed. There is no real story with them, more “show and tell.” This style of video is difficult to watch all the way through and leads to people skipping forward or not bothering to watch it at all.

Something else that Matt touches on his post is the value of capturing both the neighbourhood and the owners’ personality. The rooms at your property are only part of the story there. As I said in my post on Aligning with Your Guest’s Needs:

If people can recognize the indentity of the property immediately, they will buy into the services that are offered, and the ones that are not.

What better way to help people identify what your property is about than by watching a video? A quick two minute video will give a person much more information than two or three pages of text. Plus, it will be more enjoyable to watch than to read something on their computer screens.

Matt paid for two videos, one of the property, and one of the neighbourhood around his property. They are both very well done, and I encourage you to click through to watch them. The one of the neighbourhood is posted below to show you the effect a promotional video can have.¹

If I were to do a video of a property, here are the elements I would be sure to include:

• Share the experience of the property (the lobby, the restaurant, staff, pool area, lounge)
• Share some of the experiences from local activities (a neighbourhood pub, a winery, a market, coffee shop or other destination activities like a golf course, ski hill, beaches)
• Share the experiences of your more popular rooms (the sitting area, the bathtub/shower, and finally the sleeping area)

I would probably design multiple videos depending on the amenities your property offers. Perhaps a video to showcase your amenities that would draw in the corporate people (meeting rooms, a focus on the work space in the hotel rooms, business services) or a meeting planner (catering, meeting rooms, accessibility to/from hotel rooms).

To find a media company to work with, do a quick Google search, and be sure to look at several of their portfolio videos before making a final decision. It would also be useful to have a sit down meeting with them to discuss your needs and what they can provide to you. If you need assistance in tracking down a company, get in touch and I will gladly assist you.

The post The Power of Video Marketing for Hotels: Why You Need It appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.