Mr. Friedlander

Social Media & PR

Social Media & Review Management Trends for Hotels in 2012

By R.J. Friedlander , Founder & CEO, ReviewPro

In many ways, 2011 was the year reviews and social media went mainstream within the hotel industry – becoming nearly universally embraced by hotel executives as both a key source of customer insight and a tool to achieve operational and service excellence and to drive revenue growth. From my perspective, as founder and CEO of a company that is leading change in the way hotels leverage and benefit from the social web, I would like to share the top trends I see in this area in 2012.

Short-format and mobile reviews will become increasingly common

While written reviews began as the standard in travel planning websites, the rapid rise of social networking and mobile communications has lead to short-format and mobile reviews becoming increasingly important. I may not have time to write a 3-paragraph review of a hotel or restaurant, but I can quickly send a tweet or leave a Foursquare tip about a place while I’m waiting for a cab or in line to check out of my room.

It’s important to recognize the importance of these short-format pieces of feedback within your online reputation management initiative. When the author of one of these messages has a large online following - or a high Klout score - the number of people that could be influenced by that piece of feedback can be very large.

Don’t make the all-too common mistake of ignoring Facebook comments, Foursquare tips and tweets as a source of valuable operational and marketing insight. While many executives understand these pieces of feedback play an important role in customer service and reputation management, all this data in aggregate provides a rich source of business, market, and customer intelligence.

The profile of the reviewer becomes important

As review sites seek ways to add credibility to their community and content, expect the importance of individual reviewers to increase. Contributors that write reviews that are appreciated by other members of the community will find their content receives special recognition, if not priority placement.

This is not a brand new trend. Review sites have historically displayed the number of reviews contributors have submitted, but what is new is how these sites show this information in the user interface.

More reviews become verified

Continuing on the trend above – and perhaps in reaction to some complaints of review fraud on sites that do not verify transactions – a few review sites are trying to link all reviews to a booking or transaction. This could be important for validating the accuracy and truth of customer-written reviews – at least in the minds of some people.

This December, Expedia announced their Verified Reviews program, which only includes feedback from guests that stayed at a property (review requests are sent in the booking followup email). "We like to call it the new source of truth, internally," said John Kim, Expedia's senior vice president of global products, in a USAToday interview. "People love the idea that our reviews are verified so you can't randomly leave a review."

While anonymous review sites will remain popular, understand that increasing numbers of reviews will be written on verified booking websites. You can compare guest satisfaction ratings on each of these types of review sites and draw your own conclusions.

More hotel companies run their own customer review programs

This October, Starwood introduced their own rating and reviews program. Members of their Starwood Preferred Guest program can review the hotels they have stayed at over the past 18 months – if they provide their loyalty program credentials or the reservation confirmation number for their stay. Unedited reviews will be posted to the hotel’s website after at least five reviews have been collected. Starwood executives are doing this to encourage guests to engage with the company more and book more repeat stays.

Expect this trend to rise in the year ahead as more hotel companies see the value of online reviews and want to control more of this experience. As mentioned above, there is the opportunity for them to link the reviews to transactions, and then use these reviews on their website to increase direct bookings.

Even if your hotel group is planning to collect your own reviews, don’t neglect to monitor and manage your presence on other sites. Also, make sure your review tracking tool can provide tight integration of your internal reviews and reviews posted on third-party websites.

Reviews and social content play a bigger role in search visibility

While many in the search marketing industry have guessed this for some time, this was the year when we clearly saw social media affecting search engine results pages. Bing integrated Facebook data as a way to personalize search results based on someone’s social network – such as links or content that friends have Liked. When a person’s friends have not shared any content related to a search, Bing will prioritize content that is popular with the Facebook community at large.

Recent Google patents unveiled some ways that social media will affect your position in their search results pages. In short,

1. the quality (score) and quantity of your reviews,
   
2. the diversity of websites that contain customer reviews,
   
3. and the sentiment behind the customer reviews

...all play an important role in increasing search engine visibility.

Why is search placement important?

Web search plays a central role in the travel planning and purchase process. One interesting statistic shared EyeForTravel’s Travel Distribution Summit in London was that travel purchases online typically involve 50+ search queries and an average of 2.5 hours of research time. Each of these searches is an opportunity to introduce your brand….if people see your website. A few statistics from Hubspot to remember about the importance of ranking well in search results pages:

1. The top 3 results get 79% of the total clicks
   
2. Only 3% of searchers go beyond the first page of results pages

Clearly, your hotels’ placement in search results plays a disproportionate role in website traffic they will receive. If your websites are not near the top of page one of a search results page, the website is practically invisible to potential guests.

The key takeaway here is to invest in building your social media presence and cultivating as many online customer reviews as you can to increase your ranking and drive more website traffic. Encourage customers to review you on Google Places and any other review websites they participate in. Also, make it easy for people to share content about your hotels on the social web. From Google Plus to Pinterest, people are looking for material to post – so make this easy for them.

Online reviews become the new guest satisfaction benchmark

Market Metrix compared their well-known Customer Satisfaction Index with online reviews and found the overall feedback to be similar – dispelling the myth that reviews cannot be trusted for management decisions. Social media and review analytics tools help you understand everything, everywhere. When indexes like ReviewPro’s Global Review Index TM are used to measure guest satisfaction across dozens of the top travel agencies and review websites, reliability improves even more. Monitoring the web and social networks for mentions of your brand name picks up insight from guests that have moved beyond the structured format of a satisfaction survey and are sharing opinion wherever and however they want. This provides much deeper understanding into guest satisfaction than could be obtained through guest satisfaction surveys or mystery shopping. It is becoming the backbone of how hotels measure employee, hotel, and brand performance.

Individual reviews and social media mentions are important to track for service and reputation reasons, but it’s all the review scores in aggregate that provide data you can act on. For hotel management, the value of social media may not be any one individual piece of social data, but rather all this feedback together in graphs that shows trends over time. This is where you can spot patterns in quality, benchmark your properties against the competition, and make department-level decisions. Online reviews present us with several compelling advantages:

• Guests can respond in a way that is easiest for them
• Then can do provide feedback whenever and wherever they want (often via mobile devices)
• They can talk about whatever impressed or annoyed them
• The ‘likeonomics’ trend means time-starved reviewers can share opinions more frequently
• For hotels that do a good job of providing an excellent guest experience, reviews posted online can act as powerful sales messages

Yet while the volume of online reviews has increased dramatically over the last few years, a few advantages to traditional surveys remain.

• Some people will only share valuable feedback through a private channel like a survey
• Complete anonymity can encourage more honest and open feedback
• Surveys can provide you with detailed feedback on specific areas of your operations

The reality is that even though online reviews are becoming the new standard, it is unnecessary to limit yourself to just one form of feedback. Additional insights can be obtained by analyzing your library of customer service questionnaires in comparison with online data. Look for an online reputation management tool that allows you to import surveys and consolidate feedback from all sources into one online dashboard. Don’t make this an either/or decision. Best results come from mixing traditional surveys and comment cards, online reviews, and social media mentions as part of a comprehensive Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) system.

“I do believe that companies that strategically combine both [online and offline feedback] will have better data to set goals and make decisions with since they will be able to collect feedback from anonymous and unbiased sources as well as feedback on specific, targeted questions.” – Liene Stevens, CEO of Splendid Communications

For example, Sidorme is a budget hotel chain in Spain that uses a mix of feedback mechanisms to improve their operations. Berta Vilardell, Director of Sales and Marketing, shares her thoughts on the difference between internal customer service questionnaires and online reviews:

“Of course we also conduct internal customer surveys at each hotel directly, but we are aware of the fact that the online reviews that we analyze through ReviewPro are more honest, as they are absolutely anonymous.”

“When we see something critical or a good opportunity appearing repeatedly in online reviews, we follow this up with internal surveys in our hotels that focus on a concrete topic, for example by asking for suggestions to improve our breakfast or asking what people would like to see in a new Sidorme hotel. This gives us a direct feedback and we can see how we could improve on a specific aspect.”

Online reputation management becomes an integral part of the entire organization

Increasingly, we see the hotel companies that have earned sterling online reputations are the organizations that use online feedback and review analytics to guide operations and management decision-making. An executive I heard at a recent conference shared this about the future of reviews:

“Social media and reputation management must move from a marketing tactic to an operational function.”

For example, Cristina Mulet and her team at Melia Hotels does a great job of taking insights from their customers on the social web and using them for product improvement, quality management, and revenue optimization. Diego Sartori and his team at citizenM hotels do something similar, taking online review feedback into consideration for each new property they open. And on the individual property level, Ricardo Samaan at Olivia Plaza used this approach to improve the quality of their breakfast.

For this, semantic analysis of online reviews is very helpful to identify big issues and investigate further. Specific, department-level reporting for each manager is critical, as is a workflow system to manage the whole product improvement process. It requires a culture of using guest feedback to guide improvement. Co-creating with customers helps hotel brands build loyalty and create a product that better fits market needs.

Social analytics impacting revenue management

The link between reputation and revenue is increasingly clear, with Brian Ferguson, EVP at Expedia, quantifying the impact on his site: “A 1 point increase in a review score equates to a 9% increase in average daily rate (ADR).” This year, we saw innovative hotel revenue managers cross-comparing online quality scores with their revenue indexes to make better informed decisions related to ADR and their online distribution strategies.

One of our clients - also one of the largest hotel groups in the world - is a pioneer in the trend of using online quality metrics for revenue decisions. Using our tool, they can import their pricing information and cross-compare with the Global Review IndexTM. We can expect to see more of this happening in the future as online quality indexes play an increasingly important role in maximizing revenue.

Avoiding 3rd-party commission fees makes maximizing direct bookings another goal for most revenue managers today. Consumer confidence plays an important role in achieving this goal, and nothing inspires confidence like the independent verification of a guest-written review. Hotels such as the Landmark London are using publishing online reviews to their website from not just one review source, but over 80 traveler rating sites worldwide. This independent verification of quality is important for people viewing the reviews, since they know the hotel has not hand-picked positive comments. Publishing reviews without editing the content of those reviews communicates complete transparency, and this builds trust.

This direct connection between reputation and revenue is another indication of how social media has matured. It is much less of an experiment than it used to be, since the impact of social reviews on profitability can be clearly seen.

Encouraging online reviews becomes critical

The trends we have looked at so far require reviews. Everything from decision making to search visibility is improved when more data is out there. For this reason, I predict hotels are going to be more creative in how they ask customers to share their experiences online through reviews. Hotels that do not have a high volume of reviews to begin with will have to become more aggressive in collecting them.

Earning positive reviews requires you to create an experience worth talking about. Does your guest experience live up to that standard? If not, what amenities or features could you offer that would get people talking? Adele Gutman of HKHotels – which operates some of the most popular guest-reviewed websites in New York, shares this advice:

“You need to WOW them. You need to give them something to talk about. You need to shower your guest with so many magical moments that they leave the hotel excited and inspired to take the time to want to share their experience with the world. People like to do nice things for nice people.”

Being remarkable is not just for luxury hotels. Some hoteliers have the impression that only luxury establishments can create an experience worth talking about. This is not true. Little things can often make a big difference. For example, a basic three star hotel in Berlin puts a free bottle of a typical local beer in every guest room at arrival. This is an unexpected touch that gets guests talking and will be remembered. Well-trained front desk staff that will go beyond their usual tasks to help out a guest can also make a very positive impression. You need to find little details that can set you apart from the average hotel experience in your market.

Regardless of how you plan to use these trends in your own organization, realize that hotel groups of every size around the world are taking the steps to leverage the growing importance of the social web and capitalizing on the opportunity that exists. Insights from social media and online reviews can be used to improve performance throughout your organization, so be sure to invest in the technology that offers you the ability to take advantage of the opportunity and that maximizes the return on investment in this process during the year ahead.

R.J. Friedlander is the founder and CEO of ReviewPro. The company enables hoteliers to increase guest satisfaction and increase revenue by proactively managing their online reputation and presence in leading social media Websites. This is achieved by providing clients the analysis, customer intelligence, competitive benchmarking and automated reporting needed to help them more effectively manage their organizations. The companies solution is designed to serve the needs of individual hotel operators, multi-establishment chains and asset managers. Mr. Friedlander can be contacted at +34 93 451 0454 or rfriedlander@reviewpro.com Extended Bio...

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