Reputation is one of the most vital variables to success in the travel and tourism industry. Hotel brands that understand the importance of what their guests are saying about them have shifted to using custom-built tools to handle the volume of reviews that are written across the internet on sites like Expedia, TripAdvisor, Google, Booking.com, Orbitz and many more.
TripAdvisor, the world’s largest travel site who received over 350,000,000 reviews in 2015, shows that 81% of all travelers consider 6-12 reviews before choosing a brand to stay with (See full article). Cornell University School of Hotel Administration published a report on social media and the effect of online reviews in the hotel industry and found that the effects of just a 1% increase in online reputation increased ADR by 1%, and similarly, the 1% increase raised RevPar by 1.42 percent. The impact of online reviews on revenue is real and is going to continue climbing with the ease of review platforms moving to mobile and the massive increase of mobile searches in the travel and tourism industry.
Increasing positive reviews is easier than it has ever been. How? Understanding the guest is the first step. A brand needs to know which questions to ask. Think back to the last time you left a review when a hotel sent you a request. You’re probably just like us – we couldn’t remember either. Then we asked WHY? We found that almost all hotels ask numerous questions that take more thought and time than needed, decreasing the chance of completion of a survey and receiving the valuable data to take action on. So we challenged that method by only asking 3 questions.
- How would you rate your overall experience with us?
- Please tell us how we did in the box below:
- Would you recommend us to a friend or family member?
These are all questions that a brand can take action on and, most importantly, we have seen our current clients “Would Recommend” rate rise above the industry average of 92.86%. We know if a guest will recommend you, they will stay with you again and leave a positive review if asked with the right value proposition. The national average “Left Feedback” rate from a guest is 9.58%. The average client running GEM, our proprietary software, Guest Experience Manager, is 25% – 35%.
In a world where online reviews continue to increase, what can a brand do to be proactive to mitigating negative reviews and handling them before they go LIVE to the world on TripAdvisor, Google, Booking.com, Orbitz and more?
This 1 star review was received through Guest Experience Manager. Guest Experience Manager (GEM) is a tool built specifically to decrease bad reviews that can end up on 3rd party sites and increase positive reviews along with many other revenue-crippling, problem solving technologies. As you can see, this review has keywords highlighted in red and green showing sentiment. This way, a hotelier can understand what was positive (green) or what was negative (red) immediately without having to read the entire review first. This review was handled on the back end and never made it to the public’s eye. All by asking the right questions at the right time and ultimately taking action on the problem before it was able to escalate into something bigger with the potential to decrease REVENUE.
Listed below are results we have seen from clients who use GEM:
- Increase in direct bookings
- Higher rankings on TripAdvisor, Google and other algorithm-based review sites
- Increase in lifetime guest value
- Actionable steps to improve
- Identifying problems in minutes, not hours, and what actions to take to improve
- Time saved analyzing reviews
- Increased ADR
- Increase in RevPar
- Increase in profit
- Increase In revenue
- Increased conversion
- Social proof tools
- Rich guest profiles
To learn more about our Guest Experience Manager and how it can help grow your business, click here.
