How Individual Hotel Locations Can Monitor Competition to Win in Local Markets
By Jonathan Sockell
This article was co-authored by
Co-authored by Linda Wiley, President & CEO, Munford Mark Management Consulting
In today’s competitive hotel environment, where consumers have immediate access to property reviews when making hotel choices, corporate leaders and property managers need to parse through volumes of information for local level competitive insight. Anonymous website visits, website searches, and competitor call-arounds provide all sorts of information on occupancies, amenities, or room rates, but many of these methods miss the very data that consumers use to make a booking decision: social reviews. Furthermore, they also don’t include the feedback that consumers give directly to the brand, in a timely enough fashion as reports are typically delivered weekly and only to managers, versus to the front line who can take action to affect change.
So, how can property managers determine which actions to take locally to beat the competition to improve occupancy rates and ultimately revenue? There are three key sources of competitive intelligence that can inform a strategic plan to steal market share and drive revenue in local markets:
- First, leverage the very feedback that your customers use to make decisions: social media reviews. This data not only gives you a clear view as to what customers think are a property’s strengths and weaknesses, but it also tells you what guests think of the local competition too, so you know what you can do to differentiate.
- Second, track and benchmark your performance through survey feedback, so you know where you are today in terms of where you excel and where there’s room for improvement.
- And third, proactively curate local hotel staff insight into what guests are telling them. In most cases, your frontline is well aware of immediate opportunities for improvement.
Competitive Intelligence Source 1: Filter social feedback to understand and act on guest needs in local markets
- Social Media’s Accessibility and Challenges
In many cases, social media feedback is the most readily available source of competitive information to your hotel’s frontline staff. Property-specific reviews stream in routinely, and they are accessible 24/7 without the need for internal network privileges, reports from corporate, or even management permission. This provides everyone access to multi-source information that spans across customer demographics to give a broad view of the sentiment of customers at location and brand levels.
The very nature of social feedback, though, presents multiple challenges. With enormous datasets across a variety of sites, it is hard to inform and empower management and frontline staff to know where to focus and where to take. Reviews, ratings and comments are unreliable at times, and are subject to the local website’s vetting policies. Additionally, many sites will filter and rank reviews based on paid advertisers, elite reviewers, or other methods that are less than transparent. That said, 79% of consumers place as much trust in online reviews as they do online recommendations, making them a source to be monitored.
Though the large number of social sources can be overwhelming and the accuracy of reviews sometimes in question, online reviews can’t be minimized because they impact booking decisions. 148.3 million bookings are made on the Internet each year, and a fifth of those bookings come from merchants who support reviews. Â Given this, we suggest equipping property locations with technology that consolidates feedback sources, offers benchmarking tools against nearby competition, and facilitates a closed loop process that engages reviewers and improves public perception of individual locations.
- Feedback Consolidation
The first step to improving your online reputation is to consolidate guest comments and reviews from all of the main feedback sources (TripAdvisor, Expedia, Priceline, Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Reviewing the feedback from these sources provides a baseline for what’s being said in the social scene. TripAdvisor alone has amassed over 100 million reviews in 34 countries, so there’s much to be covered. For corporate, it may be unrealistic to monitor every online review, but there are consolidation and text analytics tools available to mine the chatter. For individual locations, reading reviews for their own hotels across the main social sites is a great way to take a pulse on guest satisfaction. To make this easier, we recommend leveraging technology to quickly consolidate the sources, which makes it easy to bring to the light the most important ones.
Once social reviews across your brand properties are consolidated, the next step is to compile the reviews for your hotel’s competition. For this to work, each hotel property in your brand needs to review and understand the social sentiment of competitor hotels in close proximity. Too many companies rely on brand-level social monitoring for this. The challenge with a big-picture brand approach is that it’s difficult to make feedback relevant at the local level. With location level monitoring, a property in a hot desert location might learn that its competitor across the street earns higher satisfaction scores simply by offering water at check in. These types of insights are easy to take action on in near real time at the local level, but much harder if the central team has to filter it information down to the properties.
- Benchmark Your Social Standing to Nearby Competition
After consolidating social reviews for both you and the competition, the next step is to benchmark individual property performance against nearby competitors. Best practices recommend benchmarking at least three sources for hospitality, and even if not all of your competitors have online reviews, we still recommend including them in comparison sets.
High level benchmarking on review sites is straightforward: compare the overall scores of your location to the overall scores of the competitors next door. Some sites, like booking.com for instance, will even trend scores by month. Other review sites, like TripAdvisor, also have reviewers enter scores for secondary metrics like Value, Cleanliness, and Service.
The aforementioned exercise provides each hotel operator with a baseline of their social reputation compared to their rivals. However, this method doesn’t account for what’s in the free form text of reviews, or what’s being said every day on sites like Facebook where scores aren’t even captured. If review volume in local markets is low enough, hotel operators could read verbatim comments in reviews and assign one point for positive reviews, zero points for neutral, and minus one point for negative reviews. Then after assigning points, compare your location’s total score with total scores from the competition. If review volume is substantial, we recommend using a text analytics tool that can automatically assign sentiment and run analytics that allow you to easily see the root cause of specific ratings for both you and your competitors.
- Socially Close the Loop
In addition to consolidating social feedback and benchmarking performance, social review sites like Expedia, Hotels.com, Yelp, and TripAdvisor support external management responses to reviews. In fact, 25% of the people posting reviews expect a response within the first hour. (3) This is a tremendous opportunity to not only engage customers in a public forum, but to also dig deeper into what customers like about competitors. For example, a guest could leave a review saying they preferred to eat breakfast next door. If the hotel operator responded, he or she might learn what specifically about the breakfast next door the person liked in an attempt to pull even on breakfast quality.
Competitive Intelligence Source 2: Analyze direct feedback from guest surveys and use the insights for both benchmarking and recovery
How often in your guest satisfaction surveys do you ask customers to compare your property to competitors’ properties? Likely this comes up anecdotally in conversations, which may facilitate ad hoc improvements when problems are simple enough to fix. However, tracking how customers rate you in comparison allows you to benchmark your performance so you can correctly prioritize the issues that impact satisfaction, and therefore revenue, most frequently. Moreover, when an issue requires substantial investment, long-term benchmarking can validate a business case.
- Approaches for Survey Benchmarking
If you have an existing survey program in place, consider appending an additional open-ended question to the end of it that asks how your hotel compares to places where the guest has recently stayed. Our research indicates that adding just a text box has minimal to no impact on response rates, and by using free form text you don’t bias guest answers.
By asking all respondents about the competition, it allows you to discover areas where dissatisfied, neutral, and satisfied guests believe your competition is relatively stronger or weaker. Knowing where you are weaker provides improvement opportunities, and knowing where you’re stronger offers differentiation opportunities.
How well though does your hotel measure up to competitors in the opinions of your elite customers? Having a tool that allows you to easily segment responses by guest category offers two benefits. One, it gives you the information required to ensure your highest spending guests’ opinions are well understood and prioritized. Second, it gives your local teams insights that can help them to innovate services for specific segments at the local level.
- Turn Benchmark Feedback Into Action
To make benchmark data actionable, we suggest creating a regular method for both collecting feedback and for sharing it. This means keeping questions congruent across locations, and committing to your appended questions for at least a year so you have relevant trend data. We suggest asking questions about the moments of truth that you find most important, whether it be the check-in process, meeting rooms, gym, or breakfast quality.
Once you have the comparative data, key management and staff need to be informed in a timely fashion so actions can be taken. At a corporate level, aggregate reporting will give insight into macro trends that can drive policy changes. At the local level, hotel management and staff need to be alerted to how they compare to properties next door. This gives them opportunity to put out fires based on concerns by closing the loop, but also makes the feedback specifically relevant to them as they’re reviewing problems from within their local market. When hotel operators know what drives customers to choose competitors next door, change to distinguish from competition happens.
Competitive Intelligence Source 3: Provide a process for your frontline staff to collect and share direct one-on-one feedback
Some of the most direct and honest feedback surfaces when hotel employees engage one on one with their guests and clients. In-the-moment feedback shared with on the scene or on the phone hotel staff holds significant value both short-term as well as potentially long-term. The reality and perception of genuine care for guests and clients, leveraged to provide a balanced view of what is important is valuable for staff a well as customers. With proper coaching and encouragement, managers, front-line and even call center staff can create the opportunity for compelling competitor insight that uncovers points of distinction that can encourage and strengthen loyal customers for your hotel.
When one considers how many employees to customer contact moments occur every day, whether in call centers, corporate customer service departments, or on-site interactions, the potential to leverage insights from employees on customer experience is limitless. All company employees and even vendor-partner employees who represent your hotel need to understand the value of engaging your customers and soliciting feedback if you want to rise above your competitors.
Service and amenity issues that would seldom be uncovered in surveys, especially without text analytics, could be the tipping point against your local competitor. Every front desk clerk, doorman and housekeeper can likely tell you what your guests say are the best and worst elements of your hotel. In a recent success at one hotel, front desk staff listened as several guests complained about the lack of pool towels at a neighboring hotel. With the addition of inexpensive poolside towels, the hotel was able to offer a simple service that added value above that of their competitor. The additional benefit of engaging your entire hotel team in creating moments of insight is that the thrill of gathering competitive intelligence empowers your staff and motivates them to create improvements, big and small. You create an entire sales team within the walls of your call center and hotel.
- Considerations for Coaching Employees
So, how do you train and coach your staff to become attuned to this type of feedback? It starts by deciding what you want to learn from your customers. This feedback source is the best for a laser-point look at specific service or amenity metrics. What targeted questions can your employees ask to surface out issues and differences? What questions are best asked by what department? For instance, reservation staff can be coached to ask why the caller selected your hotel and to use the answer to overcome objections or reinforce the sale. Hotel employees can ask key questions such as, “What can we do better?,” “Is there anything you need?,” and “Why did you select our hotel?” to not only solve problems but also be alert during the conversation to pick up clues about how to out-perform the competition. The customer mix surveyed using personal engagement is not limited to those with email addresses or access social media, but can include a large sample group that includes client contacts, meeting planners, even visitors.
Then, train and challenge your staff to take advantage of their daily customer encounters to ask those targeted questions, listen thoughtfully to the response and ask additional questions to gain more insight. One hotel company has a “Question of the Month” for each hotel representative by department tied to strategic business improvement goals. The question provides every staff member of that hotel with a simple way to gather intelligence tied to the company mission.
- Operationalizing the Employee’s Voice
While soliciting and listening to feedback is important, it is vital to create an easy-to-use tool for employees and company representatives to record and share what they learn. Whether it is a simple printed form, an electronic template or a regular team meeting, results derive from rolling up the feedback so your management team can review, respond to concerns, and transform talk into results.
Regular communication of the insights, results, and progress toward the strategic goal will create buy-in when reinforced with recognition and incentives for participation. Celebrate the value of insider knowledge and you not only gather great competitive feedback, but your customer service will become more engaged and intuitive.
- Plan of Attack: Methods for Beating the Competition
So, how do you develop a comprehensive approach to competitive insight and tactical response using social media, managed surveys and hotel staff insight? The goal is to uncover common key impact drivers that distinguish your hotel from your competitors, both positive and negative. When you know the key impact drivers, you can shape a strategy to drive action steps for improvement, which must include engaging your front line. We suggest the following methods:
1. Determine your methodology for consolidating and evaluating the different insider-intelligence sources to provide a picture of how your hotel compares to local competitors and where you excel or falter. Points to consider when consolidating the information include the scope of your competitive market – how many hotels will you include in the comp set based on segment and proximity and what weight do you assign to each source in the comprehensive view? While developing a single, global view that consolidates all feedback perspectives is ideal, just the commitment to monitor and draw conclusions from key sources enables you to craft an effective strategy to outpace your competition.
Regular, comparative reporting of key performance and competitive benchmark metrics will help highlight trends and anomalies from period to period. Ideally, determine which metrics have the most impact on RevPar, Occupancy and Market Share, and then compare your satisfaction scores and detailed issues to what impacts these key metrics. Whether this consolidated review and reporting effort is coordinated internally or by partnering with an outside provider, this initial step provides a balanced view of customer satisfaction that can be leveraged to increase market share, drive performance improvement and ultimately revenue.
2. Develop a strategic action plan based on the key drivers that will make your hotel the preferred choice for travelers to your market. It can be tempting, given the volume of feedback data, to try to tackle many points with a rapid-fire approach. Instead, focus on the most accretive actions first to ensure you can align your hotel team to affect the most influential metrics.
3. Build a training plan to ensure management and front-line staff understands the strategy, particularly how you selected the key drivers, and the positive results that can follow by focusing on them. Engage hotel staff by helping them to understand your approach with specific examples and role-plays to not just inform, but to empower their efforts.
4. Plan for regular on-going feedback, training and communication with your hotel front-line and call center staff to ensure initial efforts are not one-time events. Managing compliance with the actions you expect your property teams to take is critical. There will likely be a few resistors to any strategy, so it is important to set expectations and hold everyone accountable for execution. Another key component of the communication plan must include recognition for progress and review of missteps so that strategy can be reset.
Beating the competition at their own game is a challenge that must involve consideration of all key feedback sources for their respective insight. Leveraging competitive and proprietary intelligence and engaging the entire hotel team locally, regionally and globally is key. By crafting a comprehensive, balanced strategy to capture, understand and manage key feedback sources, every hotel has the ability to assess their position in their relative market and take focused, result-driven steps to exceed and excel in driving performance and revenue.
