Knowing how to get an hotel online reputation management plan up and running is easier than you think, especially when you have some best practices in mind and the right tools in place. When done correctly, effective hotel online reputation management means better online visibility, which means an easier time attracting and retaining customers and beating out the local competition.
Hotel Online Reputation Management Tip 1: Claim Your Listings
A crucial first step in hotel online reputation management are your listings. These are the best and easiest ways for customers to find you, which makes it even more important to display updated and accurate information about the hotel. This can be vital elements such as a phone number, website, or even physical address. A small typo in the address or an outdated phone number can mean that you miss out on guests willing to spend their money with you but who choose a competitor instead because of their accurate information.
With the right local listing management software you can easily get the hotel up and running on prominent business review sites. With ReviewTrackers joining the Google My Business Featured Partner Program, we not only help get your hotel listed on one of the most popular review sites online; we can also get it verified, which helps you get in front of even more consumers looking for a hotel near your area.
Hotel Online Reputation Management Tip 2: Ask and Respond to Reviews
Improving your hotel online reputation management circulates around customer feedback. Your current collection of customer reviews will serve as valuable social proof to those looking for a place to stay. However, it’s also important that you use reputation management software to properly triage and respond to the reviews left by previous guests. Responding not only helps you address issues or tell your side of the story; it also shows that you care. Customer reviews data shows that only 36.7% of consumer get a response from a brand. Taking the time to acknowledge their feedback and providing any additional information where necessary shows that you are willing to engage with consumers – a potential differentiator when the time comes to make a purchase decision.
Knowing how to respond to reviews is only one-half of your customer feedback strategy. You’ll need to practice the art of asking for reviews. Getting a constant stream of feedback gives people an accurate picture of the current state of the customer experience while also showing your ongoing engagement with guests even after they check out.
Hotel Online Reputation Management Tip 3: Analyze Guest Feedback
Improving the digital reputation of your hotel also means acting on guest feedback. You’ll need to be able to easily gather keyword sentiment and trends across a collection of reviews to make the data-driven decisions needed to upgrade the customer experience. Even with a small team, this process is quite the daunting task. Manually reading every review and noting specific keywords and then comparing those with the ones gathered by other team members takes plenty of time and investment.
However, you can use new hospitality technology, such as customer experience analytics, to conduct the same work in a matter of minutes. With just a few clicks, you can see what customers like and dislike in the current state of your experience across hundreds, if not thousands of reviews. With enough data, you can provide valuable insights to key stakeholders and make the decisions that delight consumers and minimize issues.
Conclusion
With the above tips in mind, your hotel online reputation management strategy can begin as soon as possible. With constant monitoring of listings and reviews, along with a review response strategy in place, your hotel can easily rise above local competitors and continue to win over consumers.
