Hotel reviews have a strong influence on potential guests and here a couple of simple things that hotels can do without spending a lot of time and money. First let’s tame the gorilla of hotel reviews, yes…Trip advisor! Fun facts…it receives about 15,000 consumer reviews daily that affect your brand. It is rumored that it receives over 24 million views every month. This is excellent news if these reviews are positive, but can you imagine the impact if they are negative? Different studies show that a very high percentage of users are influenced by the reviews on Trip Advisor. So what can we do to minimize damage? Act. The simple steps I have outlined will only take a few minutes with no $$ investment.

Step 1
Go to trip advisor website and type in your hotel name to see what your customers have to say. Trip advisor allows you to respond to consumer reviews, you as a manager or owner can set up an account for your property to get notification of guest reviews via email as well. Don’t postpone this. The sooner you start familiarizing yourself with this process the better it is. Remember that people are using these reviews to judge your product and you as an hotelier needs to be able to respond to comments. Social media is not about control but engagement and listening, nobody is perfect. People want you to pay attention to what they are saying and make concerted efforts to make improvements. So it is important that your responses are visible to people on websites that publish guest reviews.

Step 2
Create a Google alert
Sign up for a Google account if you don’t have one already at google.com. Then select Google Alerts and enter your property name in the search field to create an alert for your hotel. This is a very effective tool and allows you to monitor your brand online, anytime your hotel name is mentioned on the internet; you will receive a notification email. It is good to know what people are saying about you wouldn’t it be interesting to see what they are saying about the competition!

Consumer generated is a powerful tool that hoteliers with a bit of creativity can put to their advantage.

Teg Brar