How online reviews shape your hotel’s guest experience
Negative or positive, online reviews are an insight into your guests’ needs, wants and expectations, where you excel and where you fail
Online reviews provide a crucial lens to help you see your property’s experience through a guest’s eyes.
First, let’s understand what guest experience is.
Guest experience is the cumulative impact of all interactions and experiences between your property and a guest, at every touchpoint across the whole guest journey. This includes your presence (or lack of) on distribution channels, your website through to your front desk, interactions with housekeeping, your amenities and even communications after a guest checks outs.
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Guest experience is not a single point of contact. It encompasses the entire customer journey, multiple processes, policies and people.
Online reviews and guest experience
Good guest experience is the most important benchmark for business success. Online reviews are one way to measure this success.
Negative or positive, online reviews are an insight into your guests’ needs, wants and expectations. Where you excel. Where you fail. Using these reviews, along with other data points and market insights, should inform how you evolve your guest experience.
What do you learn from each type of review?
Negative reviews
If reviews are negative, it’s obviously an area that needs addressing. You should analyse any negative reviews thoroughly, taking into account the guest’s profile, other reviews and anything else you know about them.
Once you’ve analysed and established it as an area that needs improvement operationally, make a roadmap to implement the change. Or, you may feel your marketing messaging may need to be revised to align guest expectations to their real experience.
Also, remember that not all negative online reviews need to be translated into action for you. Always investigate before you make a change arising from a review. Also look at negative reviews as an aggregate, rather than in isolation.
A minor hiccup due to human error that translates into a negative review is acceptable. Too many of these hiccups require change.
Whatever the next steps from your negative reviews, always ensure you communicate with the guest who left it. Keep them in the loop – from acknowledging the review, and letting them know you are investigating to the action you are taking, make your guests part of the journey.
Neutral reviews
Don’t ignore largely neutral reviews too – your goal should be to deliver experiences that wow your guests!
A direct guest survey can help identify areas that need improvement. Neutral reviews also offer hotel management an opportunity to engage with past customers, making them feel cared for and heard, thus building trust and brand loyalty.
Positive reviews
Positive reviews offer even more data into what guests are wanting from their holiday or travel experiences as the things that they are commenting on will be things that they really value.
Ensure these things remain – and are constantly improved – on your guests’ journey.
Positive reviews are also the gems you should be using in your marketing to sell your property. These are your social proof to attract potential guests.
How to keep track of your reviews
While monitoring your guests’ feedback is the secret that can solve many a manager’s woes, it is also tricky to keep track of the myriad of platforms available for guest reviews, think Booking.com, Tripadvisor, Google, and Facebook to name but a few.
STAAH ReviewMinder is a great way to keep online reviews across multiple channels, including alerts to new ones and responding to reviews in one click. The highly visual ReviewMinder dashboard makes it easy to monitor reviews, including the sentiment of each. Combined with insightful reporting, making informed decisions from your online reviews to inform your guest journey will be a breeze.
To sum it up…
Online review management is one aspect of the overall guest experience, but a very important one. The more we interact and communicate with satisfied, dissatisfied, and neutral guests, the more insights we will glean from them. We can learn from all types of reviews and ultimately improve every subsequent guest stay.
STAAH blog originally appeared HERE
Edwin Saldanha, Marketing Director at STAAH
STAAH Ltd is a New Zealand-based technology company that specialises in innovative cloud-based solutions that simplify hospitality operations and open a world of online commerce for accommodation providers of all sizes. Founded by Gavin Jeddo in 2008, an industry pioneer,
STAAH’s technology suite comprises channel management, direct bookings, online reviews management and gift voucher management system.
Our passionate and diverse team is based across New Zealand, Australia, India, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and the UK providing 24/7/365 support and service to our network of more than 18000+ accommodation partners worldwide.
Our quest for delivering high-quality solutions that deliver results is recognised by industry partners in the form of Airbnb Badge, Booking.com and Expedia Preferred Partner. We are a New Zealand FernMark Licensee.
