When prospective guests search for your hotel on the web, what do they see? TripAdvisor and other social media networks are readily accessible from every search engine and make it easy for your potential guests to get an insight into your past guests’ experiences at your property. TripAdvisor has top rankings on Google for thousands of hotels, so if your hotel has the number one spot for its name, recent reviews of your property, both positive and negative, are also in prime position.
Hotel reviews are now up all over the web and found, for example, on sites like Google Maps. TripAdvisor has also introduced a partnership group, which gives hoteliers and travel websites the opportunity to post TripAdvisor reviews. This group already consists of 100 content partners and 14,000 websites with a widget or badge. No longer tucked away on TripAdvisor.com, your reviews, both positive and negative, are accessible by travelers from almost anywhere on the web.
Yet TripAdvisor is still a tool that many hoteliers are failing to use to their advantage for hotel reputation management. With 32 million unique visitors every month, and with more than 30 million reviews on over 1 million properties, TripAdvisor wields more influence on hotel and travel choice than any other platform.
So, how do you leverage this exposure?
As TripAdvisor continues to evolve its digital visibility on the web, it endeavors to increase reservations for hotels. One of its newer initiatives is the “business listing”, which allows hoteliers to include direct contact details on their hotel’s page on all TripAdvisor domains. Business listings are available for an annual fee, but they do not enhance your property’s ranking on TripAdvisor. Your property’s ranking is affected by a number of factors including quantity of reviews, actual ratings from the reviews, and whether the reviews are out of date – the more current a review, the more positive an impact it will have on your property’s ranking.
With this ever-increasing visibility of online reviews, monitoring and managing what guests are saying about your property on TripAdvisor, is vital. Relying on a small number of good reviews in not enough, especially if your competition is actively encouraging their guests to post reviews. If your competitor’s guests post positive reviews, you may see their property ranked higher than yours, if it’s not already, so why not actively solicit reviews from your guests? There are tools available on TripAdvisor to help you; sign up via “Owners’ Center” on your TripAdvisor listing and benefit from email reminders, review widgets, flyers, and custom reminder cards. You can also actively manage your reputation from here by creating management responses.
Management responses are a critical reaction to negative reviews. How a hotel responds to criticism can sometimes have more influence over a booking decision than the criticism itself. A well-crafted management response can go a long way – it’s a public opportunity to apologize to the guest who posted the review and to show all prospective guests that you have remedied the issue. It also demonstrates your commitment to improving your hotel and your guests’ experiences.
Putting all these measures in place should not detract from your most important goal – to give your guests a great experience. By taking advantage of the unique insights you get via reviews and by applying this knowledge to improving traveler experience, you are able to achieve your objective at a completely new level. Hoteliers must address problems travelers identify so they don’t have a negative impact on future guests’ experiences….and your reviews!
Learn more about creating an effective reputation management strategy.
About GlobRes
GlobRes is one of the few companies to offer a full online reputation management service that includes creating management responses to hotel reviews. GlobRes relieves your hotel of the pressure of finding all the mentions of your hotel on the internet and responding appropriately and effectively.
Why choose GlobRes as your Online Reputation Manager?
• Your dedicated account manager pro-actively monitors what guests are saying about your hotel online.
• You receive notifications of new reviews directly to your mail box from your account manager.
• We respond publicly to reviews & comments and interact on your behalf with your online community in five different languages.
• We upload images, add factual information about your hotel and upload new content to give your hotel accurate representation on the prominent hotel review sites.
• We provide you with coding to install on your website allowing you to feed your hotel’s positive reviews from TripAdvisor on to your site.
Editors Note: Please direct all press queries to marketing@globres.com
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
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