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.