How to put online reviews to work for your hotel business?

You can make reviews work for your hotel only when you know the art of managing them well.

Travelers look for reviews before finalizing a hotel. Why?

Because they want to know what others have to say about hotels as they find them genuine and authentic.

To know how the services hotel provides, the behavior of staff, activities, or anything guests enjoy or dislike about specific hotels.

Hence, it’s critical to manage them well, and if you find negative reviews then work on the issue they are mentioning in the review.

I know it’s really time-consuming and details oriented work to check all the reviews and manage them.

But, no worries, there are many technological tools that are available in the market

For instance, Online Reputation Management(ORM), and Guest Satisfaction Survey(GSS).

And key customer systems such as Property Management Systems (PMS) or Customer Relationship Management(CRM).

In this article, I will cover how you can make use of Guest Satisfaction Survey to get more reviews.

And use Online Reputation Management to put online reviews to work.

A guest satisfaction survey is a digital form you send your guests just before they are leaving or after they left your hotel.

These surveys complement reviews, because, here you have to approach your guests and request them to answer questions of your choice.

Thus, helping you to dig deeper, and know the cause of the problems your guests are facing.

Post guest stay surveys are sent after the guests left the property to understand their experience during the stay.

Apart from their experience, from it, you can get feedback about the recent changes bought into your hotel.

You can also ask guests a simple question to know whether they like your hotel and recommend it.

For instance, Will you recommend our hotel to others? And take its answer in the score.

Alternatively, you can implement In-stay surveys.

In this, you only have to send a quick 2-3 questions to guests to capture issues and solve them before guests leave.

Thus, it shows your proactive approach, and dedication to providing satisfactory services and adds your brand to their good books.

Afterward, you can see the reviews you get are mostly positive.

Don’t stress much if few didn’t love your hotel until they are not posting derogatory reviews.

Because, if you are getting a bunch of reviews. It will boost your review score and ranking.

Guests will post their reviews on different sites like TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Google, Expedia, and many more.

Guests will rate your location, cleanliness, services, staff behavior, the comfort they feel, and so on.

Now, it’s time for you to reply to reviews posted by guests in the best possible manner.

But, chances are a few will be missed out and many will get delayed responses.

So, now what? Here comes Online Reputation Management for your rescue.

The goal of Online Reputation Management is to showcase the company in the best light.

The tool follows a reactive approach because it addresses damaging comments by companies or people.

For instance, a customer posts an angry review or something showing a brand in a bad light to show the whole internet.

Hence, by minimizing your negative customer feedback and keeping your online presence positive you can manage your reputation.

Instead of managing reviews manually by going through websites and social media pages, automate tasks through Online Reputation Management.

Google Alerts is one such tool, here you have to enter your brand name and receive notifications of media and news stories that are mentioning your company.

Moreover, another tool Brand24 not just checks mentions on news but also monitors social media mentions.

Apart from that this tool even performs ‘sentimental analysis’, which checks emotional words and you will know how people feel about your brand.

Let’s look at the process you can follow:

Firstly, research the sites you should cover to get the best outcome.

You can cover both globally recognized sites and regional sites based on the areas your hotel expanded.

Consider only those sites where your hotel gets reviews.

Use ORM to collect reviews, it can collect the details listed on the site.

The reviews are entered into proprietary Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms.

It will look for keywords that correlate to hotel experiences like ‘room’, ‘staff’, ‘bed&breakfast’, and many more.

It will also check adverbs like ‘tidiness’, ‘friendly’, and ‘tasty’.

There are ORMs that look for sentimental words, but there are many which operate on words like ‘love’ and ‘hate’ to assess the review’s importance.

If your hotel is globally recognized then there are many people who will review the hotel in their language.

Hence, you can translate languages to English by using tools like Google Translate and then apply NLP analysis to English.

But there is one issue the tone used by customers in their language cannot comes across as offensive or sweet as it was meant to be.

However, to avoid this you can use tools that analyze reviews in different languages but they are expensive.

Whenever possible respond to reviews in the same language.

If you won’t then have a solution that understands reviewer language and respond back in the same language.

A lot of ORM systems allow you to select competitors and check the same information that you are checking for your hotel.

For instance, a large number of American visits your hotel, hence you filter and see how they rate their experience at your hotel,

And compares that with what they say about your competitors.

This way you can find out where your hotel is standing in the competition and work on its improvements.

Guest post pictures with their reviews, through the use of sentiment analysis and NLP, you can identify things that need to address.

And what others are liking about your hotel.

The goal should be to turn our guests into ones who will promote your hotel. It’s not difficult just give good service and talk tactfully.

And whenever your staff receives compliments from guests, they should know the next step to overwhelm them.

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