What Is Online Reputation Management For Hotels

June 23, 2021
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What’s in it for me?

Your most feasible introductory guide on online reputation management for hotels including the ways to measure it, track it and its importance as is discerned by paying a close attention to your online reviews. If you’re new to this concept, we promise that by the end of this article you will have attained immense clarity on the basics including the tips and hacks such as optimizing your social media, working on your hotel website, responding timely to your online reviews, and more.

Online reputation has emerged as one of the most important factors behind a hotel’s performance. It is directly linked to the hotel’s image, which, in turn, is related to the financial performance of the hotels. Hence, it has become important for hoteliers to take steps to ensure that the online reputation management for hotels is addressed and maintained appropriately. In order to manage their property’s reputation in the virtual domain, effective implementation is required to deal with this particular issue.

What Is Hotel Reputation Management?

Online Reputation Management (ORM) for hotels can be regarded as being responsible for creating and maintaining a positive perception of you and your business among people. In the context of the hospitality industry, it usually involves dealing with negative reviews or feedback in the online domain. However, in most cases, it primarily involves ensuring that whatever content you create describes the business or the brand, thereby increasing its visibility to the target audience.

What Does Reputation Management Include?

Managing reputation is all about observing and influencing how your hotel is judged online. It usually includes keeping track of review sites, posting and engaging on social media, optimizing your site for search, and much more. It also allows you to engage with your existing, new, and potential customers, earn their trust, have an appealing online presence, and influence their booking decisions.

Below is what should be included in your ORM arsenal:

• Reputation monitoring: Reputation management provides the opportunity to evaluate your issue followed by a reputation monitoring plan. The primary goal is to create and maintain a positive reputation in the virtual domain and regularly monitor it across the different social media platforms and other important channels. This can be done with the help of the reputation management software for hotels.

• Reputation repairing: The act of repairing reputation includes detecting negative content during the search results and addressing them if required. Addressing these issues usually helps in generating goodwill and creating a positive reputation.

• Reputation building: While the above-mentioned points are primarily reactive, this particular aspect of online reputation management for hotels is proactive in nature. Building a positive reputation can help you project a good brand image and attract more traffic to your websites. One of the ways to achieve this is by creating positive content. Having a strong online presence backed by a positive reputation can help you deal with the upcoming challenges.

Why Is Hotel Reputation Important?

Reputation Management has emerged as one the most significant functions for hotels to stay relevant and successful in this highly competitive business environment. Building a positive reputation online and striving hard at every step to achieve this goal will never go out of fashion.
In the present day world, the content that you create and provide to your target audience determines your popularity ranking to a great extent. Users nowadays analyze everything, right from a hotel’s review count, website, search engine rankings to social media. With reviews being a major factor in the overall brand reputation management and the associated success, it has been found that,

  93%

of the people use online reviews when booking a hotel

Besides,

→ 52% of individuals would never book a hotel with zero reviews.
→ 88% of travelers won’t even consider hotels with a star rating of less than three.

So, here is why you need to consider reputation management as a vital aspect of your hotel management strategy:

• A good hotel online reputation score aids in bettering your position in search results and optimizes your visibility on various booking channels.
• More exposure is what you gain from a flourishing online reputation management for hotels; something that goes without saying!
• It is a common tendency on the part of the travelers to book a property that ranks in the top ten-fifteen search results! And if your property happens to be on this list, it’s going to work wonders for you in every aspect- getting more bookings, driving sales, crushing your review score, getting more positive reviews, and so on.
• Hotels can also use the data fetched from online sources to study customer behaviors, analyze, and explore the possibilities of overall business growth.
• Online reputation management can also contribute to building relationships with potential guests and improve the image among the aggrieved guests.

Your hotel reputation has a direct impact on your sales volume and overall revenue. However, not every hotel is clear on the best approach to managing their online reputation. By taking an organized, wider approach, your hotel can reap the maximum benefits and avoid pitfalls such as missed opportunities, negative reviews, and wasted time.

Other Benefits:

• Higher trust: People trust a brand with a good reputation more.
• Increased profit: Companies with high star ratings and reviews get more business.
• Better talent: Brands with a positive reputation attract better employees.
• Less risk: People move with crowds. Call it the “broken window theory” of reputation management.
• Gentler treatment: Properties that share the same core values as their clientele are likely to overcome a reputation scandal easier than the one without if they have worked on the concept of online reputation management for hotels holistically.

What Is Likely To Bring You Bad Reputation?

It is often frustrating not being able to control people’s perception of your property. As we know, one disgruntled guest is more than sufficient to ruin the reputation of your business. At times, all it takes is a post or a video of bedbugs in one of your hotel rooms to puncture your existing reputation. Hence, it becomes important to maintain a strong online presence. Your behavior towards the guests and attention to their journey, right from the pre-booking to post-stay is a major factor in enhancing or bringing down your brand image.

How Does Reputation Management Help Boost Room Sales Of A Hotel

A sound reputation of your hotel will have a direct impact on your hotel occupancy levels in the long run. With the help of technology, you can leverage online reviews to increase business, boost your ratings and stay ahead of your competition. How travelers perceive, rate, review, share, and search for information about your establishment directly affects the success of your hotel.

How Is Online Reputation Management For Hotels Measured

Good, bad, or crazy, hoteliers often stutter over the question, “How to do online reputation management?” While online reviews and ratings on platforms like TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Expedia, and even Google are some of the simplest and easiest ways to gauge a hotel’s overall performance, two other factors also contribute to measuring its online reputation:

a. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
b. Natural Language Processing (NLP)

a. Net Promoter Score: It takes into account the ratings of a review. If the rating is 9/10 or ⅘ and above, it is regarded as a promoter while a rating of 6/10 or ⅖ is considered as a detractor. Reviews with ratings of 6 to 8/10 or ⅗ are regarded as passive.

b. Natural Language Processing (NLP): It is an AI-based way of gauging the online reputation by analyzing the guest sentiments in reviews. For instance, the negative-sounding words like horrible, bad, or worst indicate unfavorable feedback whereas words like good, amazing, or great point to the review being positive.

How To Track Your Hotel Reputation

For any customer-centric organization, reputation measurement is an essential way to understand how people feel about your brand and what they think when they come across your company’s products and services. Consequently, you need to invest in a good reputation management solution that positively shapes and influences your brand. In order to measure the online reputation management for hotels, your company should be able to identify and measure key brand reputation metrics.

• Online Reviews and Ratings: Online reviews represent the voice of the customer and are very influential in shaping your brand reputation. Monitoring your online reviews across multiple websites is a key hotel reputation measurement strategy. Learning how to respond to negative reviews and positive feedback, and making smart business decisions based on review insights is a surefire way of working towards building a fabulous brand image.

• Social Media Engagement: Social media is a great platform for keeping your fingers on the pulse of your online reputation. Using your content to lighten up your social media platforms is a great way of engaging with the right audience. Tell them more about yourself, your brand, what you stand for, what is your vision, etc. A thing as simple as installing a vending machine at your property should be celebrated. Give that much-needed shout-out to the long-pending property overhaul, change in furniture, revamped breakfast, etc. by sharing these accomplishments with your audience.

Online Reputation Management For Hotels: Key Pointers For Tracking

• Repeat Website Visits: Your organization already likely integrates analytics into your website development strategy. If so, take a look at the number of repeated visits your site (or other core web property) is getting. A user may visit your website, product pages, or blog once and decide never to return. Hence, optimize your hotel website and make it as engaging as possible. Abandonment does not even take seconds if the user’s expectations are not met instantly. With highly interactive features like chatbots, live chats and other AI solutions, you can capture and retain the user’s attention, thereby going to the extent of converting a visitor into a guest.

• Review Widget: Your client testimonials and positive reviews are your trophies, ones that need to be flashed openly. This will help others to form a positive opinion of your business and try their luck with you. Let’s be honest here! Isn’t a review widget showcasing unpretentious, genuine, and positive opinions about a business intriguing to you as a first-time visitor on a website? It might not be appealing initially, but once you analyze what’s written, pair it with the user experience you’re having on the website, and see from where a particular client perspective is coming, you’re likely to give it a go! So, incorporating a review widget as social proof on your website is a wise thing to do!

Relevance Of Reviews When It Comes To Maintaining The Online Reputation Management For Hotels

Reviews act as one of the crucial online reputation management tools for hotels. The more positive reviews, the better for your business and sales volume. But receiving no negative reviews is again something suspicious and to a greater extent leads people away from your brand by perceiving it as unreliable and inauthentic. Hence a mix of both positive and negative reviews is needed to help the travelers make an opinion.
Of course, the focus is on getting more positive reviews but it is only based on negative reviews that you will grow by identifying the areas that are coming across as unimpressive and less glamorous to the customers. Based on this constructive feedback, you can invest in a course of action, that will help you convert the negatives into positives the organic way, which, in turn, will boost your online reputation score.
With reviews, the collection from various sources becomes rather problematic. As a hotel owner, you need to list your property on various online channels and OTA platforms. A consolidation of these reviews in a single dashboard is what you need and thankfully, a good reputation management solution can help do just that and a lot more.
According to TripAdvisor research, 97.7% of customers read other travelers’ online reviews before planning trips and booking hotels.

Why Is It Important To Maintain Your Reputation?

The benefits of good online reputation management for hotels include higher trust, better talent, less risk, and more profit. Companies with good reputation tend to be treated better online – even given a second chance.

→ 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations
→ Consumers read an average of 7 reviews before trusting a business.
→ 97% of consumers search online for local businesses. 12% of consumers do so on a daily basis.

• Your Online Presence is Pervasive: The internet offers a wide variety of platforms for you to engage with potential travelers. These include your blog, comments on your blog, others’ blogs, review sites, posts and comments on social media feeds, and much more. This means that there are more opportunities than ever for people to engage with or talk about your business.

• Communication is Essential For Trust Building: It is imperative in the hospitality industry to respond to all comments about your business. Responding to positive mentions will help to build further engagement and strengthen your relationships. Responding to negative reviews is crucial for mitigating the damage.

Online Reputation Management For Hotels: Reputation Monitoring

• Unknown Listings: Online reputation monitoring isn’t just about responding to reviews, it’s about identifying where you are being reviewed in the first place.

• Word of Mouth is Trusted and Travels Fast: Potential customers are eager for reassurance that your business is the right decision, and will be highly encouraged to convert upon seeing positive reviews. The influence of what others have to say about your business can fetch you good recommendations and attract more leads in the future.

• Feedback: Knowing what people are saying about your business can help you to identify what’s working and what’s not so that you can better serve your target audience and customers.

Effective management of hotel reputation helps you secure a competitive advantage. Conversely, a poor online reputation could potentially lead to serious losses. In many cases, business owners spend years building up a positive image of their brand and are surprised by how quickly their hard-won reputation takes a hit!

How To Get More Reviews For Great Reputation Management

It is important to not let great stays at your property go unnoticed. Apart from providing top-notch services and a memorable guest experience, it is also important to project them to potential guests. However, without the guests providing any feedback on their stay, the entire matter runs the risk of rendering itself moot. Thus, having a host of strategies to extract reviews from your guests is important. These strategies, if employed correctly, have the potential to softly encourage positive reviews, and subtly drive your guests to do so willingly. Here are some of the methods that can be employed to secure more guest reviews for your hotel online.

Here’s how to gather more hotel reviews:

» Start with providing a memorable experience to your guests
» Get hold of your guests while they are still at the hotel
» It is advisable to keep in touch with the guests right away to get more reviews
» Do not ignore the importance of mid-stay feedback for possible service recovery and instant damage control
» Optimally utilize technological tools to simplify the endeavor
» Tell guests how their feedback will help your hotel

Conclusion

With the prominence of technology, the importance of online reputation has multiplied manifold. Travelers or guests have immensely increased their dependence on online reviews for selecting the perfect hotel for their dream vacation. The correlation between the increase in revenue and the good reputation of hotels only goes to emphasize the idea being discussed above. Thus, an increase in recognition for the importance of online reputation management for hotels has been noticed. The increasing popularity and acceptance of Automation and AI across all sectors have been doing its best to touch and transform the hospitality sector across the globe.

With GuestTouch, Stay Ahead Of The Curve With A Complete 360° Picture Of Your Hotel’s Online Reputation Management

Manage all your reviews on a single dashboard and craft 100% personalized, handcrafted responses to the same. What’s more? Increase your ranking, get more reviews, collect instant feedback, craft and share stellar and simple-to-access surveys, receive strategic management reports, boost your online score, and derive actionable operational intelligence from guest reviews.

Have questions? Our free demo has all the answers!

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