It doesn’t matter if you’re a small, boutique hotel or a popular chain brand, your hotel’s reputation is everything. Potential guests are savvy enough to investigate reviews ahead of time prior to making a decision and if your hotel isn’t up to their standards you just lost not only a guest but revenue as well. While everyone should be striving for an impeccable hotel reputation, like everything else in life, there will always be rough seas to navigate. And in this case the rough seas are unhappy guests who are more than happy to write scathing reviews trying to tarnish the experience for potential guests. Your hotel’s reputation is everything and if you’re not monitoring it, you’re potentially setting up your hotel for failure.
There isn’t a space online where your brand or hotel’s reputation can’t be located. Google, Expedia, Hotels.com and to everything in between has customer reviews for your hotel. From the good, the bad and even the ugly; everything is right there for potential guests to read. And while you cannot control what previous guests write, you can control the message, from a brand standpoint, as well as control future actions or decisions to help mitigate the negative reviews.
You and your staff are the ones that hold the keys to the car that is your hotel’s reputation. You can either have an enjoyable, long distance drive or you can drive the car right off the cliff. That choice is in how you respond.
Show Guests You Care
The smallest gesture of responding to a review could lead to you having a customer and advocate of your brand for life. It truly does not take much to take the time to respond to a review. It shows that you care about the reputation of your hotel and it shows potential guests that you’re invested in providing a memorable experience for them while they’re on your property.
With so many sites that offer reviews it can be a daunting task to reply to each and every review that comes in, but showing an attempt to get to as many as possible enforces your hotel’s commitment to excellence and providing a positive experience. You want to show that you don’t only care about 5 stars reviews, but you care about the experience of your guests. It starts from the booking process and it extends to the check-in service, housekeeping, concierge, food and beverage and everything in between that will interact with your guests on a daily basis.
Potential guests read reviews. They want to know that the hotel they’re booking is going to make their time away from home enjoyable. Nobody wants to book a hotel where review after review isn’t the greatest. It doesn’t matter if the hotel is cheaper, guests are willing to pay for a better experience.
Guests are willing to pay for a better experience.
By showing potential guests that you care about their experience, how your hotel makes them feel, how you respond to the comments and review left by previous guests, it lets them know that you value their time there on your property. It shows you want to treat them to an experience as if they were your own family and not just random people willing to pay to sleep on your property because it was the cheapest.
Negative Reviews are a Blessing in Disguise
You can be asking yourself how can a negative review be a blessing in disguise, but negative reviews can show you where the kinks in your proverbial amor are. Every setback, every mistake is a learning experience for both the hotel and it’s staff.
Unfortunately there are days where nothing goes right; it happens. Show your guests that the minor inconvenience they experienced on your property was more of an anomaly than the status quo. Owning up to the bad experience is better than ignoring it all together.
You learn more about yourself and your brand during adversity. From how you handle it, to how your respond to it. It is always easy when things are going well, but when there is a negative experience, how will you remedy it?
Of course there will be negative reviews that are just nasty for the sake of being nasty and don’t offer anything concrete as to why the experience was unpleasant for the guests. You don’t want to dismiss those, but you also can’t use them to decipher where the areas of improvement are.
The Importance of Social Media
Reviews and thoughts about an experience at your hotel isn’t just left on sites like Google or Hotel.com, it’s also shared in on social media in real time. Guests can share their thoughts and experiences with posts and videos, both positive and negative and it’s these “reviews” that often have the ability to go viral.
Often these posts will tag the hotel’s social media account, tag the hotel location or use the hotel’s hash tag and this is a great way for your brand to monitor your hotel’s reputation online. You can respond almost instantly with the guest and engage with them. For example:
If a guest is at the hotel bar raving about the service or the drinks, you can invite them to come to concierge to get a voucher for a free drink. You can also tell them about your latest drink or food specials they can sample while they’re there. The more you give your guests things to rave about, they will.
The same holds true for a negative experience. If a guest has an issue with their room or another amenity on the property, reply to them, thanking them for making them aware of the situation and inform them that you’re currently working on rectifying the situation for them. You can offer a complimentary drink or something else comparable for their inconvenience.
You want to show guests you care good or bad. They need to know that their experience on your property is something you value. It’s about creating a memorable experience that will translate into a repeat guest.
Influencers
While the wave of using TikTok and Instagram influencers has crested, there is still value in hiring a notable industry professional as an influencer. You’re not going to leave the reputation of your hotel vulnerable to an “influencer” with 1,000 followers and only wants a free stay out of the experience. You want someone who is familiar with the ins and outs of the day to day hotel operations.
A well known influencer can generate more bookings than a positive review. There is value in reviews and even greater value in the word of a well-known, trusted influencer.
An influencer won’t be cheap. Room, food and beverages will be expected to be comped and they’re not going to stay in some double full-size bed room. They want the best of the best. Make sure you’re willing to go above and beyond during their stay or their influence can turn sour quickly.
How to Manage Your Hotel’s Reputation
While it may be one person’s job to manage the reviews online, it takes the entire staff to manage the hotel’s reputation. Every employee has an integral role and every job has a symbiotic relationship with another job.
Housekeeping has to get the rooms ready so the front desk can check people in. Servers need the kitchen to be operating at an optimal pace so they can serve guests their meals and so on and so on.
There isn’t a job on property that doesn’t contribute to guest’s experience.
When responding to reviews online there needs to be a unified tone in each response. You cannot have multiple people responding to reviews and each has a different voice or tone that is conveyed in the responses.
Your brand needs to have a clear voice and messaging that is used each and every time. From Google reviews to Instagram, the tone has to be consistent throughout.
Most customer service call centers have a proverbial “playbook” that they use to respond to questions and concerns from customers calling in. Your hotel needs a similar playbook that covers how to respond to both positive and negative reviews. The playbook is a fluid document that will change over time to reflect the changes that any hotel goes through. And the advantage of a playbook is that will employees coming and going the playbook will remain the constant in how responses be will shared.
You can also outsource your hotel’s reputation management to firms and businesses that specifically specialize in reputation management. The advantage is that your team doesn’t have to focus on providing responses to reviews daily and can focus more on the guests experiences that day. The downside is that a good amount of these businesses outsource the work to places in India and China where they don’t have a stake in the hotel or it’s reputation. It’s just a job for them and they don’t care what happens to the hotel because there is always another hotel that will need their service.
How to Monitor Your Reputation Online
There is no magic pill that will let you know when a review on Hotel.com has been written. You will have to diligently scour each website for reviews. It’s a daunting tasking, but one that needs to be done. A trick that would help cut down time would be to create a Google alert that emails you every time your hotel brand is mentioned online, from social media to blog posts and even to some reviews.
Tracking mentions of your brand on social media is a bit easier as guests can tag the hotel or the location and you’ll get notified of such events.
Monitoring online reviews feels like a 24/7 job, but it can be broken up to having team members look at reviews twice a day for an hour or two. It is hard to respond to each and every review especially if you’re a major chain or brand hotel that has hundreds or thousands of guests daily. Focusing on responding to the negative reviews first and then work your way down to the positives would be ideal for a major chain hotel. You’ll often find that major chains have more positive experiences than negative just because they’ve been in business longer and know the tips and tricks to minimize negative experiences.
If you’re a smaller hotel or boutique hotel, reviews can make or break your business. Guests often tend to stick to the “safer bet” with the bigger chains and if you’re smaller hotel you only get one chance to make an impression. You don’t want to find yourself with negative reviews and no responses to explanations why the negative experience occurred or how you planned to remedy the situation. It’s more than your hotel’s reputation at stake, it could be the jobs that people depend on to survive and if the hotel closes because of poor business, those same people will be out of a job.
If you’re interested in learning how to manage your hotel’s reputation online better or need consulting on how to make your hotel’s day to day more streamlined and profitable, reach out to B Hospitality Consultants on our contact page and one of our consultants will gladly help you out.
