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