Find Out What Your Customers Really Think
I was at a conference recently for a global hotel company with a large franchise base. As per usual at these types of events, the corporate office was extolling the benefits of buying into more corporate programs and upgrades to help individual owners run their hotels more effectively and to better results. At this event, one of these programs was the company’s proprietary system for garnering guest reviews of their hotel stays. A more sophisticated system than the traditional “comment card,” these Web-based programs are encouraged because they are better at capturing and retaining customer data, probably which will be geared toward more sophisticated CRM programs down the line.
Yet as an outsider listening to the “hard sell” of these systems, I couldn’t help but think –is this really how hoteliers today want to learn what customers think of them? I’m not so sure. No one would argue against the importance of guest feedback, but I would contend that if a hotel owner or general manager really wants to know the truth about his or her hotel, the best place to look my not be that more sophisticated comment card but to the external world of Travel ‘2.0.’
TripAdvisor.com is the largest Web site for unbiased hotel reviews (the authenticity of which the company continues to defend vehemently), receiving some 1,400 new posts every day. And yet it is only one of a growing number of such peer-review, or social travel, sites. New such sites are expanding rapidly and even becoming niche oriented. For example, one of the newest on the scene is attached to the popular site Facebook. Now college kids can list upcoming trips as well as future travel interests, then display them on their profile page. They also can search for other Facebook users with similar travel interests.
What I’m saying is that smart hotel operators who really want to see not only how their hotels are doing but also how their competition measures up, can—and really should—monitor these sites on a regular if not daily basis. They simply provide more immediate and impactful feedback than a company’s internal mechanism. The beauty of these sites is that guests are not responding to specific questions or prompts. And, actually, hoteliers can actually learn how to improve their operations by “listening in” to these discussions. Free market research.
One hotel company tapped into this is New York-based Affinia hotels. Its GMs are told to check out TripAdvisor as part of their daily routine, and reply to postings, be them good or bad. The company even went so far as add a link to TripAdvisor reviews of its hotels on its own homepage.
While many may fear the immediacy of these sites, it is important to remember that if hoteliers monitor them carefully, they also has a quicker way to address any problems – and their resolutions – to a giant universe of would-be guests. So I just think in today’s wired world where people are using the Internet to plan and book travel more than ever before, hotel companies should at least be addressing the value of these sites in a conversation that is about the importance of guest feedback.
For more information on the growing popularity and impact of social travel sites:
TripAdvisor reviews on your hotel website
