Key Insights
- Manage and Encourage Reviews: Regularly respond to reviews, encourage guests to leave detailed feedback, and maintain a steady flow of positive reviews to enhance your hotel's online reputation.
- Invest in Staff and Service Excellence: Properly train and motivate your staff, ensuring they deliver consistent, high-quality service that reflects your hotel's values and positively impacts guest experiences.
- Maintain Transparency and Build Trust: Be clear and honest about your offerings, avoid hidden costs, and deliver what you promise to build trust and foster guest loyalty.
- Leverage Online Presence and Social Media: Optimize your website for user experience, utilize multiple review sites, and actively engage on social media to reach a wider audience and improve your hotel's visibility and reputation.
Did you know that 82% find reviews extremely or very important when it comes to making a choice for an accommodation? This is not surprising as in our digital era many offers online can turn out to be a nasty surprise in real life. Long form reviews (reviews with a text of minimum 140 characters) are preferred by 76% of travelers when booking accommodation. 68% are more likely to book a particular hotel (or other establishment) after reading a long review.
An increase in bookings goes hand in hand with review velocity and a high average rating of your hotel. Your online reputation is something you should pay great attention to, and review management should be on the daily agenda.
We have 13 suggestions for you, that greatly impact the overall rating of your hotel and can assist in improving your online reputation.
Avoid Negative Reviews
Negative reviews are inevitable, even for the best hotels. There will always be that one disgruntled guest who seems to dislike everything. It is crucial to always respond to negative reviews and provide your business email address so they can reach out. By being polite and focused on resolving the issue, you can turn a bad situation around and increase the chances that the guest will change their review.
The popularity ranking factor means that recent reviews carry more weight. This makes it essential to ensure a steady flow of new reviews, so positive ones outweigh any negative feedback.
To prevent negative reviews from being published in the first place, you can address them at the core. With Obenan, you can create a review campaign that redirects negative reviews to a private survey. This allows you to improve your services based on the feedback without it being posted online, giving you more control over your hotel’s overall rating.
Encourage Guests to Leave a Review
Review Velocity is an essential ranking factor in (local) SEO. A constant flow of customer reviews shows that your business is active and that you take customer feedback seriously to continually improve your service. The more reviews you collect, the more you help potential guests feel confident that your establishment is legitimate and offers the promised services and amenities. Additionally, if you are committed to providing excellent service, gathering more reviews will help improve your ranking over time as positive feedback overshadows negative reviews. Be sure to follow up after a guest has checked out and ask them to leave a review.
Engage with Your Audience
Feedback, whether positive or negative, is invaluable in the hotel industry. Actively ask your guests for feedback and make it easy for them to leave reviews. Provide satisfaction surveys in their rooms and encourage your staff to ask for reviews on multiple platforms as well as general feedback. By understanding what guests liked and disliked about their stay at your hotel, you can continuously improve your service, implement new staff workflows, or invest in desired amenities. Over time, this will naturally lead to guests leaving more positive reviews as your overall service improves.
Staff Excellence
Alongside unclean rooms, unfriendly staff is at the top of the list of reasons for dissatisfied guests. Invest in properly training your staff, ensuring they feel motivated and comfortable in their roles. Educate them on your hotel’s brand tone of voice and core values. Offer incentives and bonuses to motivate staff to gather feedback and reviews from guests. Your staff is the backbone of your hotel; they are on the front lines and are a decisive factor in how people rate their stay. Investing in your staff can greatly influence your hotel’s online reputation over time.
Be Transparent
Be consistent and transparent about your offers and what guests can expect. Avoid hidden costs and always update the images of your hotel and surrounding areas. For example, if a beautiful beach view has been obstructed by a new building constructed in the last three years, but you still display photos from five years ago, you can almost be certain that guests will leave a bad review. Only promote what you can actually deliver. Be transparent about offers and what they include. If guests have to pay for numerous extras, they will be disappointed. Hidden costs are not the way to go.
Build Guest Trust
When guests trust you, they are more likely to return as loyal customers and recommend your hotel to friends and family. Always make sure to deliver what you promise and continuously engage with your guests. This point goes hand in hand with all our other recommendations. By being transparent, having friendly staff, and actively listening to your guests, they will feel heard and taken care of, and their trust in your hotel will grow.
Optimise Your Hotel Website For Search
Your website is essentially your digital business card. You should optimize it not only for (local) SEO to improve your online visibility but also for a seamless and smooth user experience. Showcase your amenities, list your offers, display recent images, and prominently feature customer reviews. Ensure your loading speed is fast, and users can easily navigate your website. Important action points should never be more than three clicks away.
Learn everything about hotel SEO and how it will help you improve your online visibility!
Create Personalized Experiences
Personalized stays can be simple to achieve! Write guests' first names on a welcome card in their rooms, provide welcome drinks, and offer complimentary water or snacks in the room. Guests want to feel special. A personalized experience goes hand in hand with trained and friendly staff. All questions from guests should be answered promptly, and assistance should be available at all times. For example, if a guest wants to explore the city, your staff should assist in arranging transportation or providing information on guided tours.
Listen to Your Guests
Analyze the sentiment of your guests’ reviews to better understand how your hotel and services are perceived. Once again, we see the importance of a commitment to service improvements. Only high-quality service that satisfies guests can ultimately lead to a higher rating for your hotel. Make sure to systematically analyze customer feedback to gain deeper insights into their experiences. Insights can range from small improvement points to surprising facts you might not have expected. Hotels and guests have a symbiotic relationship; guests need to provide feedback to receive better service, and you need to not only encourage feedback and reviews but also take action once guests have done their part.
Obenan can help you with our special sentiment analysis that provides you with all the important insights gained from your customer reviews. Let us transform these complex data into actionable insights and recommendations that make it easy for you to continuously improve your service.
Learn everything about our sentiment analysis, our Emotion AI Tool!
Provide Instant Communication
Provide quick and easy options for your guests to contact you before, during, and after their stay. Ensure that they can reach you easily through your website and that questions are answered promptly. During their stay, your staff should always be ready to assist guests with any inquiries they may have. After their stay, use follow-ups to encourage guests to rate their stay and thank them for choosing your hotel. By expressing gratitude and reminding them, you increase the chances of them returning to your hotel.
Reward Loyal Guests
A study by Harvard Business School revealed that even a 5% increase in loyal customers can not only bring in up to 95% more profit but will also cost you approximately 20% - 40% less than acquiring new customers. You can allocate these funds towards improving your services and staff. Loyal guests will also serve as ambassadors for your hotel, both offline and online. Word-of-mouth remains one of the most impactful factors in decision-making. Therefore, introducing a loyalty program for guests can be a great tool for not only increasing customer retention rates but also improving your overall hotel rating score. Loyal customers are much more likely to participate in feedback generation activities.
Use Multiple Review Sites
Make it as easy as possible for your guests to leave a review. While some guests might prefer Google as their main platform for reviews, others may choose Tripadvisor or similar directories. Having reviews on as many sites as possible will increase your bookings since guests may not always find you via your website or Google Business profile. They can come from many directories, and while they may eventually click through to your website, having no reviews on the directory will significantly reduce the chances of them doing so! Additionally, on your Google Business profile, review ratings from certain directories will be displayed, so don’t neglect local directories.
Managing multiple review sites can be time consuming and challenging! Synchronize all your business information automatically across multiple directories!
Monitor Your Social Media
Where do you start when looking for inspiration in all kinds of areas? Correct, social media! Being present on social media channels such as Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok can significantly increase your reach and can be a great tool for improving your online reputation. Showcase your hotel, events, and staff. Encourage guests to tag your hotel in their own photos. Post meaningful updates that encourage conversation and actions (like, comment, share). Monitor how your hotel is perceived by guests across social media channels. For example, how are guests talking about their experience on Facebook? Social media can not only be a great tool to showcase your hotel but also give you deeper insights into your customers' experiences. It can also be a great way to encourage reviews, promote your loyalty program, and share special offers. Engaging with previous, potential, or loyal guests online helps you stay ahead of the competition, improve your service through new guest insights, and ultimately generate more reviews and improve your overall hotel rating!
Also interesting: 8 Instagram Hacks to Boost Your Reach and Gain More Followers in 2024
Summarizing Our Findings
As we can see, all activities revolve around actively listening to and engaging with your guests. Their well-being should be your all-time focus, and a commitment to continuously improving your services through feedback generation can improve your hotel rating score over time. Review velocity on multiple directories can be the decisive factor for future guests choosing your hotel. Online activities such as responding to reviews, collecting local citations in suitable directories, a user-friendly website, and social media presence go hand in hand with offline activities such as investing in trained and friendly staff, actively encouraging reviews and feedback, and creating a personalized experience for your guests. By combining all 13 activities, you can sustainably improve your online reputation and increase your overall hotel rating score.
