Reputation Management Should Be a Team Effort

Everyone who works in a hotel has their particular job and sticks to what they do best. But everyone, at some point, touches the guest and has the ability to shape his or her experience. Therefore online reputation management has got to be a team sport—hotel managers should strive to get everyone involved, experts say.

That’s not to say the housekeepers should be on TripAdvisor posting responses to reviews. Larger properties should have a dedicated point person, said Daniel Edward Craig, former GM of the Opus Hotel Vancouver and now an independent hotel consultant.

“Whether you have an actual reputation manager or you’re not there yet, you need a gatekeeper—someone responsible for monitoring reviews and feedback,” he said. “Then you need a champion to make sure you’re acting on that feedback and responding to it.”

For most hotels, one person can oversee online feedback from the vARIety of different sites—TripAdvisor, Google, Yelp, Facebook and Twitter, to name a few. Craig said, for one midsized hotel, he estimates it takes approximately 10 hours per week to monitor and respond to critical reviews.

“It requires discipline and some streamlining, but if you’re spending more than that you should be getting some strong results,” he said.

Josiah Mackenzie, director of business development at ReviewPro, said for any major initiative there has to be a point person making sure it’s coordinated and set up.

“Who should that be? Choose the position more based on the personality than the person’s role in the organization,” he suggested. “Are they trustworthy? Detail oriented?”

Get everyone involved

But online reputation has moved beyond monitoring and responding to reviews. Guest feedback now is being used to modify operations and price hotels. And for that to occur, different team leaders need to stay informed on what’s being said online. The reputation manager, if you will, must get the information to the right people at the right time.

“The first thing I always recommend is it not just fall to one person at a property but the properties that really do well at reputation management are the ones where everyone is aware what effect their own personal job has on the hotel’s reputation,” said Brian Payea, head of industry relations at TripAdvisor (http://www.tripadvisor.com/), which recently modified its Management Center tool.

TripAdvisor’s new Management Center, released last week, gives hotels more functionality and new educational content, such as a library of videos, resources for training new staff, tip sheets, in-depth how-to guides and a blog with updated sources of information. It is intended to work in tandem with third-party reputation management software that aggregates feedback from additional sources.

“Properties where it’s really cultural—where positive reviews are seen as positive affirmation—are the ones who really do well,” Payea said. “Not just one person but multiple people sign up for alerts.”

He said the volume of reviews a hotel is receiving will determine how much time needs to be spent disseminating and responding.

“If you’re getting consistently great reviews you don’t need to be quite as obsessive, but I definitely recommend responding as quickly as possible,” Payea said.

Mackenzie said the hotels most successful in reputation management are delighting customers by making it a “team sport” from operations to revenue to sales.

“Make it very visible—something that can be tracked—and let everyone know, especially the frontline staff, that your job and your interaction with guests plays a huge role in occupancy,” he suggested.

As an example, Mackenzie said CitizenM hotels share guest feedback with its teams by printing out reports and placing them in staff break rooms. Another group of hotels incentivized staff members that are mentioned by name on a review, he said.

“It’s a flawed strategy to say you can assign one person to reputation management and put it all on that person’s shoulders,” Payea said.

New to the game

At ZMC Hotels, a management company with a portfolio of 33 branded and independent hotels in 12 states, Ellen Troeltzsch is responsible for monitoring feedback and relaying important topics to each of the 33 hotels. ZMC has been using a third-party aggregator since March and admittedly is only in the beginning stages of using feedback to shape operations.

“We’re growing some sort of development plan,” she said.

Currently the plan is Troeltzsch will monitor the reviews, draft a response and send it to the respective GM at the property. The GM will change or approve, send it back to Troeltzsch, who will then submit it to the appropriate site. “It’s a little cumbersome, but I don’t want to keep the GMs out of the loop,” she said.

She said GMs are good at being in the lobby and talking to customers but often times don’t want to sit behind a desk. For that reason, ZMC is telling GMs if they feel comfortable delegating the reputation management responsibilities they can.

“The ones that have embraced it, get it. We have a couple of properties that have ongoing conversations on Facebook,” Troeltzsch said. “It’s a new habit and it’s one of a lot of new habits they have to get. The pressure is to bring money down to the bottom line and keep their employees and guests happy … This isn’t always on the top of their list. Once they get it, it’s easy and fun.”

Five Basic Guidelines for Managing Your Hotel’s Online Reputation

Did you know that according to a study by World Travel Market (2010), 35% of travelers change their initial choice of hotel after browsing social media? Good reviews can significantly increase your conversion rates as well as impact your average daily rate. Managing your hotel"s online reputation, especially your online reviews, is absolutely critical. Here are five basic guidelines to get started with.

1. Create a remarkable guest experience

Give your guests something to write about. Ensuring a great guest experience is the single best way to earn great online reviews. This is not just for luxury hotels! Little things can often make a big difference. You need to find little details that can set you apart from the average hotel experience in your market. And in fact, this may actually be easier for a 3 star hotel than for a five star hotel, where a high level of service and "little extras" have already become a base line expectation.

Show guests you are approachable. Make an effort to ask people during their stay if there is anything you could do to make their stay with you better. Most hotels ask for feedback after a guest has already left (via e-mailed surveys) or with a feedback card at the end of their stay. By that time, if something wasn"t right for the guest, you may already have lost a customer. Listening to your guests while there is still time to fix mistakes is a great, proactive way of monitoring guest satisfaction.

Social media portals like Facebook and Twitter play an important role here, as travelers use them during their trip. Monitoring these sites gives you the chance to react to comments while guests are still at your hotel.

2. Set up listening systems

With hundreds of OTAs and travel sites now allowing users to post online reviews and an immense number of blogs, photo and video sites, social networks and online travel guides out there, it is virtually impossible to manually check the internet for mentions of your brand. There are tools that can help you monitor these sites, and they range from simple free notification-only alert systems to highly sophisticated online reputation management systems that allow you to not only monitor, but also analyze and react to online reviews and other mentions of your brand.

Which tools are best for you depends on your needs as well as your budget. Small individual hotels might initially be fine with just some alerts and a tracking tool that shows the latest online reviews, whereas established individual hotels and hotel chains will probably need a more advanced system that enable detailed analysis on a brand and individual property level, departmental analysis and benchmarking with competitors.

Remember that reviews are more than just a marketing responsibility, they can tell you a lot about your daily operations, guest satisfaction and overall quality; they can increase or decrease your revenue. Identify what guests are talking about. Are there recurring patterns, specific departments or issues that are frequently mentioned? Make sure you are sharing reviews throughout the organization so each department receives feedback they can act on.

3. Deal correctly with negative reviews

Negative reviews are usually caused by an operational failure followed by a service failure. If you follow guideline #1 and show guests you are approachable and can solve issues when they occur, you are on the right path to avoiding negative reviews. If you do however receive a negative review, you should usually respond (not all sites allow this). Showing that you are listening gives potential customers the confidence that you care about customer feedback. In fact, a negative review with a management response is a great opportunity to demonstrate how you deal with difficulties, should they occur. Write a brief reply thanking the reviewer for their feedback, say you"re sorry you didn"t meet their expectations and show you are taking their feedback serious and sharing it with the respective departments. If the review mentioned something positive, be sure to mention this in the reply as well! Then take the important next step - share the review with your team and use this valuable feedback to improve your product or service.

4. Manage your own online presence

You can influence what reviewers write by impressing them with a great experience at your hotel. And you can lead by example, by managing your online presence and having your own voice online.

Start by making sure you provide consistent information on all channels. Take advantage of listing management options. For example, TripAdvisor allows you to upload photos of your hotel. Make sure you do this and keep the photos current.

Next, you should define an online communication strategy. Decide who should respond to public comments online. Make a list of all your online presences and ensure that they are monitored and updated on a regular basis, and assign clear responsibilities within the team for managing this. If you create profiles on sites like Twitter and Facebook, make sure in advance that you will be able to regularly post updates. An inactive page or profile often looks worse than no profile.

5. Manage reviews proactively and systemically

Once you have set up monitoring systems and are confident you are aware of everything that is being said about your hotel online, you should get into the mindset of managing feedback proactively, rather than just responding reactively.

If you have acted on previous complaints by guests and used their feedback to make improvements in the hotel, you can mention these to guests at checkout. For example, if you just renovated your spa and added new lounge chairs, you may ask, "Did you have the chance to use our spa while you were here?"

If the guest did use the spa and liked it, let them know you appreciate their feedback and are happy to hear they enjoyed it, as you just renovated the spa and added more comfortable lounge chairs in response to guest feedback. Mentioning a particular aspect of your hotel or service to guests at check-out increases the chance that they will remember this when they write their review