Mr. van Santen

Social Media & PR

Social Media and Reputation Management

By Riko van Santen, Vice President Electronic Distribution, Louvre Hotels Group

Content is King

Traditionally, one of the key areas that hotels focus on is the optimising of its content to provide the market with relevant and rich data of its property, in order to maximise revenues.

From a content perspective, the arrival of social media changed the way consumers were served information of a hotel – hoteliers who until recently relied upon their formal presentations on the (brand) websites, the GDS channels, 3rd party booking sites (OLTA’s) and printed directories or glossy brochures – now faced the challenge of having their hotel description in forms of reviews and discussions, spreading rapidly without having much say in the matter. Hoteliers needed to understand and grasp this new dynamism of hotel reviews, feedback, comments, and even photos and videos, posted by individuals, where the good, the bad, and the ugly of guest experiences were blending together all at once. The internet was no longer a medium for one way content delivery, and we were fast moving into the so called Web 2.0 environment.

When review sites began appearing during the past decade (difficult to imagine that Tripadvisor is almost 12 years old already) many hotel chains began assisting their hotels to understand this phenomenon, and focus on both the risks and the opportunities.

The risks were clear – negative reviews could damage the reputation and business could suffer, especially in competitive destinations where consumers are presented various alternatives to your property. Hotel chains began implementing processes to include checks on such review sites, to ensure they are aware of any harmful comments and are able to follow up on them. This often took years to get fully integrated into the hotel operations’ daily routine, as, even today, many hoteliers still may not understand the full scale of and impact these reviews have on their business.

The opportunities, however, were not immediately evident. The concerns of negative reviews overshadowed the unique tool hoteliers now had to be able to assess their product and service, and to achieve a deeper understanding of how guests experienced their hotel. Hotels often still relied on guest questionnaires and forms – both online and offline, as the primary means of customer feedback. But online guest reviews would offer a larger information base to harvest guest perception from, where guests seemed more willing to offer candid feedback of their experience.

And as hotels became savvier with search engine optimisation and were hungry for fresh content, it soon became evident that this form of user generated content (UGC) could enrich the hotel’s presence on the internet by adding original content filled with relevant keywords relating to the property.

So when we first introduced guest reviews on our brand website in 2007, the decision was motivated by these two drivers: a means of delivering guest reviews to the hotel management’s direct field of sight and integrating it into back office applications for analytics, as well as adding fresh content to the website to contribute towards search engine optimisation.

Several OLTA’s were quick to spawn guest reviews for hotels they offered, accelerated perhaps by the fact that Google started scanning for reviews on sites when returning their search results in their SERP. OLTA’s understood the growing influence these reviews were having on the net, and would integrate their scores into their ranking algorithms. This was a logical step, seeing conversion of look to book is of paramount relevance for any E-commerce business, and seeing the growing interest from web users in reviews (it’s everywhere – for cars, consumer electronics, books, software, apps) this was an efficient new measure of the conversion probability of a hotel on their sites. Although the ability to edit, respond to, or even remove a (bad) review varies per site, it’s logical that all consider the review scores increasingly relevant and thus focus more attention on the relation between commercial results and customer emotion.

Most OLTA’s chose to adapt the “fenced” model where they avoided anonymous visitors to post bogus comments, as concerned hoteliers were questioning the authenticity of some of the guest reviews posted on 3rd party sites.

This was indeed a key consideration when we integrated guest reviews on the brand website using guest departure triggers in the collection process. As we are certain that the reviews are authentic, we can follow up on this data for internal benchmarking of service levels and hotel performance. In 2011 two more major international chains added self generated guest reviews to their own sites, underlying a possible trend towards focused attention to the most loyal and influential guests.

When it comes to influence, we do believe that hotels need to understand the larger scope social media covers in terms of hotel reputation and effect on guest behaviour.

Although the three platforms mentioned so far – review sites, brand websites, OLTA’s arguably cover the majority of hotel guest reviews today, the social network sites are increasingly influencing hotel presentation and reputation.

Most hotels and hotel brands are now represented on the major social network sites in some form or another, varying in depth and presentation depending on corporate strategy, market position, geography, or quite simply budget – and will continue to develop and optimise its usage of this medium as a revenue generator, just as the industry did with more mature channels such as the call centres, GDS and websites. Marketing departments have been eager to utilise such mega platforms for brand building and to analyse and target specific demographic groups, while a new form of client relationship has emerged where a public audience can give their feedback and build rapport with the brand or property. Many hotel pages on such social network sites offer a link to their web booking engine, and last year we integrated a booking engine within the fibre of Facebook in order to integrate the reservation process with Facebook’s rich user data.

For certain social networks where the platforms render location data (Foursquare, Facebook, Google) hotels in particular need to ensure their content is optimised to take maximum advantage of this part of what became the web 3.0 evolution, where we see virtual and real presence mixed and, in some, cases, automatically served up to the internet audience without specific manual human input. This then includes guest reviews and customer interaction entwined in various data sources.

To be able to manage these vast sources of externally generated content – hotels are turning to software applications to help assist in consolidating, analysing and responding to guest feedback. For how could hotels otherwise manage their reputation, or guest emotion, on their websites, review sites, booking channels, social sites, blogs, tweets, and geolocations, let alone in multiple languages? Just as channel management software fulfilled the needs of hotels to connect to various extranet platforms for managing rates and availability and receiving reservations, reputation management software filled the growing void between hoteliers and social media content.

When we launched an RFP in early 2011 to determine which software to use for this purpose, there were the obvious criteria such as number of sources tapped, which languages it can handle, the user friendliness of the GUI and reports, and the financial model.

However we believe that the most important aspect in our decision making process was to choose reputation management software with the ability to customise the system to integrate into our existing business operations. For example: can we integrate the evolution of reputation scores into the existing management reporting processes of customer satisfaction, or can we utilise this information to improve various booking channel’s rankings and thus market share, or can we measure against our comp set performance on e-reputation that would enable revenue managers to have an additional tool to determine pricing tactics? Indeed we have seen that by tapping into guest reviews hotels have even changed their comp set because the traditional means of defining the set may be different from how today’s traveller sees the supply. From a global chain integration’s perspective, the reputation scores also need different weightings per property, language, or source to emphasize the importance of certain markets or channels of distribution. After all, the guest reputation score’s makeup is a changing, complex algorithm not too different from, say, Google rankings (SEO), or Facebook rankings (SMO) where key relevance of who and where play an important role.

Truly the online reputation of the hotel is influencing several aspects of the business: Operations can now better understand their product and service levels; investors and owners can measure what impact renovations could have on demand; marketing can analyse, influence, and respond through loyalty and CRM programmes, whilst distribution and revenue management can better drive revpar.

2012 should see such reputation management systems further integrated into the hotel’s CRM, distribution and RM Systems. The key is for the systems to be able to communicate seamlessly, because the social media environment is about instant access to, and reacting to information. Since the days when hotel companies first connected to the GDS, the hospitality industry has recently taken huge strides in standardising communication protocols between various systems utilising the work of associations such as the Open Travel Alliance (OTA) and Hotel Technology Next Generation (HTNG).

This year we also have high expectations in terms of how clout scores will further enable hoteliers to better understand the social network ecosystem and leverage their social media strategy. By better understanding the resonance, follower base, expertise, and reach that our guests have when providing review content, we can better react and optimise our business activities. As Google further rolls out their + model, and seeing how this can now be integrated into SEM activities, it shows again that hotel searches are becoming more personal due to the social network influences.

Content was always key in hospitality distribution – now that it is complemented with guest interaction, it truly is king again.

Riko van Santen graduated with an honours degree in Hospitality Management from Middlesex University, London, and also holds a degree in Japanese business studies and various software administration qualifications. Following experience in various rooms division and revenue management functions at luxury properties, Mr. van Santen joined Pegasus Solutions/Utell in 2000 as Group Revenue Manager. In 2003 he was appointed Director of Electronic Distribution and by 2007 V.P. of Electronic Distribution & ICT for the Golden Tulip TOP Hospitality Group. Currently based at Louvre Hotels Group‘s headquarters in Paris, Mr. van Santen architects the group’s distribution and e-commerce across 6 brands, ranging from 1 star to 5 star properties. The group’s Central Reservations System Goldres was among the first hotel reservations system worldwide to achieve full NGS Connectivity, Total Pricing and BAR functionalities. Mr. van Santen can be contacted at 33-1-42.91-4740 or rvansanten@louvre-hotels.com Extended Bio...

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