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. 

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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.

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I was listening to a video of one of my favourite (and sassiest) writers online, Ashley Ambirge, talking about how all the marketing in the world doesn’t matter if the website is crap. First impressions are especially important in the hospitality industry since the time invested in the website and other marketing materials greatly effects people’s judgment about the property itself. Of course, it’s not entirely true that a poor website = a poor property, or a great website = a great property, but most people will come to a quick conclusion to pass on a property if they can’t find the information they are after.
The website isn’t everything for the property, though. The appearance of the physical property is equally important, and like Ashley says, all the marketing in the world can’t cover up how crappy of a place it really is. That should be common sense for a lot of owners and managers. Unfortunately, a lot of people are quite oblivious to the problems around them and refuse to see what is in front of them.

I can understand why things get bad, but what is inexcusable in my mind is avoiding problems and believing things will correct themselves. You reach a tipping point where adjustments can be made, but the damage of previous negative reviews is beyond repairable. This happened with a property that I tried to help out last year.

Like most travelers, I visit TripAdvisor and other hotel review sites to gauge how well a property is actually doing. I read about the guest concerns so I can bring something to the table in my conversations and find solutions to problems that currently exist. When I visited the profile of this hotel, it was a horrifying experience, to say the least. Here’s a snippet of one review:

The word ‘resort’ needs to be removed from the title of this disgusting motel. It’s a long story but I’ll stick to the main points:
1. dirty room – with dirty towels and blood on sheets
2. bathroom had fungus (actual mushrooms) growing
3. garbage bin outside of room smells like DEATH!!! We were told 3 times that it would be removed – it wasn’t! The smell made us gag – literally
4. at 12:30am an employee banged on the door then kicked it in, breaking the lock – NO JOKE! (all because we didn’t return the extra key because ours was in the room) We are a family with 2 adults and 2 kids – needless to say, the kids were petrified to stay.

It went on for another six points, and is surrounded by other negative reviews. Incredibly, it’s managed a two star rating on TripAdvisor.

An owner or manager can’t edit or delete these reviews, of course, but they do have the opportunity to respond to them. Being humble and apologetic can repair some of the damage if the complaints are minor. With the above complaint, an appropriate response would be to be honest, admit the mistakes, and announce the plans you have in place to make changes. What makes the above complaints worse (if that’s even possible) is that there were responses to other reviews, but this one and other really negative ones, did not have a response. Reviews that happened after this one were responded to, so the owner had been following up with the reviews.

Mistakes like this are not easily fixed. Apart from fixing everything happening at the hotel level, there needs to be some serious work on rebranding the hotel, rewriting the copy and design of the website, engaging with these former guests to address their concerns, and making public statements about how the hotel has revamped their operation.

To protect yourself, I suggest visiting TripAdvisor and taking control of your property’s engagement with the public. You can receive notifications of the reviews, get monthly newsletters, and get access to website badges to include to show off your ranking. Vist this link to start taking control now.

Here is Ashley’s video. Short, concise, and possibly Not Safe for Work.

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