Reputation Management

Hello and welcome to the latest INNsight weekly training education blast. Our weekly post will highlight and educate you about one existing feature each week.

Now that you have made the smart choice to have your property Powered by INNsight, we want to make sure you are getting the most out of all the tools available within the INNsight Hotel Digital Marketing System.

This week, we are going to take a deeper look into the topic of Hotel Reputation Management.

Reputation Management

Do you know what the buzz is about your hotel? Do you know which channels are used by guests to talk about your hotel and if what is being said, is even favorable? Do you know how to get more Guest Reviews? Do you know how to react to unsavory reviews?

As sellers of lodging, hoteliers need to be aware of their property's online reputation; Not just how many stars their hotel ranks, but the property's online reputation. There is a big difference between the star ratings and rankings and your actual reputation.

Higher rankings in online hotel reputation result in more bookings for hotels. Poor hotel reviews can be crippling. In lodging, travelers are looking for an experienced and expect to be comfortable and any negative feedback being broadcast about cleanliness, service, and facilities can result in damaging consequences for an innkeeper financially. In turn, favorable reviews can result in increased bookings and a significant lift in revenues.

Knowing where to look, and how to manage your property's reputation is extremely important.

A hotelier needs to know if their property's reputation is being compromised. Savvy travelers leverage the internet to research properties, services, and hotel rates but most important to today's hotelier, travelers leverage subjective reviews left by others to make their final hotel booking decision.

Online reviews and the explosion of social networking work hand-in-hand. Social media and online reviews are very important to any purchase being made online.

At INNsight, we keep a pulse on our client's online reputation.

What Channels are Being Used to Promote Reviews and Build Relationships?

Building relationships before, during, and after a guest's stay, is very important and can result in favorable reviews online. There are both offline and online tactics to obtain new reviews. First and foremost, the most important means to receive reviews is to provide a great stay and lodging experience to your guests from check-in to check out. We recommend that you leverage off-line tactics and your hospitality charm to ask guests to leave a review. Create a Guest Review Card and append it to your guest's folio and actively ask happy guests at checkout if they could help your business by leaving an online review:

Guest Directory and Guest Card

The Guest Directory is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool that displays a Guest Card for each guest who has made a reservation at your INN or stayed at your property in the past. You can filter through the Guest Directory by using the alphabetical sort buttons in the Guest Directory's header. Or you can easily find a specific guest by name by typing their name into the search dialog box and clicking ‘Search’. Each Guest Card provides the Guest's Name, INNsight Passport User ID, and Location.

To the right of the Guest's user details, there is an envelope icon to send a message to the Guest and a pull-down menu that shows all of the folios for past stays at your INN. If you click on the envelope associated with any Guest, you will be taken to your email client to compose your message to that guest.

Guest Directory and Guest Card

Twitter and Facebook are some of the most powerful tools to spread the word. Social likes and chatter work just like any other review.

Managing your hotel's online reputation is as important as knowing all of the channels used to communicate your reputation.

INNsight knows how to manage your social networks, tweet on your behalf, engage customers on Facebook, and draft blogs. This is included in our Premium Subscription packages. We take all of the painstaking work of setting up and maintaining your social media and do it for you.

TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor is the “go to” website for travelers researching places to stay. Your hotel's ranking on TripAdvisor for your destination is highly important as a traffic source.

We recommend to our clients to participate in TripAdvisor's Business Listing service to drive traffic to their website Powered by INNsight.

While this may be costly as TripAdvisor charges per your property size, a business listing on TripAdvisor allows you to post Promo Codes and Special offers that really attract potential guests, especially if your property is highly ranked due to good reviews. Despite the cost, our calculations show a massive Return on Investment where the investment pays for itself at least 3x.

INNsight provides a TripAdvisor icon on your Property Profile Page on INNsight.com and your hotel website Powered by INNsight which shows your most recent TripAdvisor Reviews.

Yelp

Behind TripAdvisor, Yelp is one of the Internet's most powerful review platforms for local businesses including hotels and places to stay. While Yelp is primarily a destination for people looking for small business reviews, it is fast becoming a destination to research hotels and places to stay.

We recommend hoteliers to “claim their Yelp business listing” and ensure that they review and monitor their Yelp Reviews. Once you sign up for INNsight, we actually take the time to ensure that your social profiles and local search profiles are set up correctly.

INNsight.com and hotel websites Powered by INNsight both display links to your place to stay's Yelp business listing.

When you subscribe to INNsight, we simplify the process of managing your Google Places account. We will handle it for you. Additionally, we ensure that your Bing and Yahoo local accounts are correctly managed.

Don't neglect your reputation on the OTAs booking engines.

Monitor qualified reviews on Online Travel Agent (OTA) booking sites where your property is located. Expedia, Hotels.com, Booking.com, Priceline, Orbitz, Travelocity all maintain their own online reputation review systems and actually solicit reviews from travelers who booked and stayed at your property. Ranking high on all OTAs booking engines where your property shows up is highly important as these sites are where lookers often book.

It is important to always review your online reputation on these channels.

Active vs. Passive Online Hotel Review Management

Poor reviews can be used as a motivation to improve. Use this feedback to correct faults, and get better reviews by addressing the issues.

Be aware of your online reputation. It is just good management. We recommend that you take the time to read and respond to all reviews, good or bad. TripAdvisor provides the facility to actually respond to a TripAdvisor Hotel Review with a Management Response.

When you subscribe to our Premium INNsight account, we have seasoned content writers respond to your reviews.

To learn more about INNsight's Digital Marketing System and the many benefits we offer in managing your hotel's online reputation management go to www.innsight.com/hotel-internet-marketing.

We recommend spending a little time every week looking through The INNsight Help Guide supplemented along with this e-Blast.

Together we will master one feature of your system at a time to ensure that you are getting the most from you website, your system, and all of the powerful INNsight tools that are available to you to help market your hotel online.

Remember, with INNsight we are always available to you--we are always here to help. Please feel free to email us at [email protected] with any questions or concerns you may have.

Thank You,
The INNsight Team