The threat of bad reviews on consumer-advisory sites has become a really strong and common form of leveraging guests.
Negative reviews can have a great influence over your potential customers. Even just a little tiny one can make someone choose a different place.
Researchers found that negative online reviews can outweigh other decision-making factors for prospective guests, including price, when they are selecting where to stay or eat.
People in the hospitality industry know that the power to soothe the aggrieved guest is more important than ever in the era of “crowdsourced negativity”.
Reputation management
Reputation management comprises 3 stages:
- Building: forming or developing a good reputation for a new hotel.
- Maintenance: keeping the positive and already established image of existing hotel to be superior in the public eye.
- Recovery: amending the hotel’s reputation when it goes bad through self-promotion and marketing in order to reverse the negative and achieve a good reputation.
As an hotelier, it is precious to obtain positive feedback from satisfied guests who share their experiences with a hotel. On the other hand, there should be an attempt to diminish negative reviews and instead use them for improving the quality of the hotel in question.
However, the main challenge for hoteliers is tracking all the negative reviews updated by users online and answering their queries one by one. It is one thing to engage actively in the promotion of a hotel’s reputation once in awhile and another to constantly monitor recent developments while keep interacting with the guests.
It is easy to get sucked into the operational vortex of the hotel’s day to day affairs while your hotel’s online reviews get neglected. Good reputation management can open new revenue channels for your hotels.
The impact of guest reviews on your hotel’s reputation
Studies state that:
- 7% of consumers’ purchasing decisions are influenced by the reviews that they read online.
- About 54.7% of the surveyed audience also admitted that online reviews are an important part of their decision-making process.
- Businesses run the risk of losing as many as 22% of customers, even if a single negative article is found by users who are considering making a purchase. In the same way, if three negative articles pop up in a search query, the potential for lost customers increases to 2%. If the negative reviews are more, a hotel will likely lose 70% of potential customers.
In today’s online market, every company is in search for a unique, organic, and interesting content that will position the company’s website on the top of Google search. Hotels can take advantage of guest reviews and use them in their marketing mix.
Good reviews not only push up hotel’s rankings and visibility. Increased visibility means more exposure to business and better reputation that pushes up both bookings and revenue.
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