Why Is Hotel Reputation Management Important

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‍A high-end guide focusing on the concept of Online Reputation Management for hotels and teaching hoteliers the importance of focusing on its management consistently by crushing their review score, improving their guest feedback strategy, optimizing their website and providing an unforgettable guest experience!

49% of consumers need at least a four-star rating before they choose to use a business.

As the digital population continues to rise in the country and all over the world, it has become crucial for hotels to maintain a good online image. This has led to the emergence of concepts and tools such as Online reputation management (ORM).

‍Hence, it comes as no surprise that the hotel reputation management has been gaining popularity because more and more people are relying on hotel online reviews and social media to make a booking decision.

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Online Reputation Management For Hotels

Online reputation can be regarded as the consensus public opinion about an individual or an entity on digital platforms and the internet. Its surge in popularity has been fueled by the wider availability of the internet and the rapid growth of social media. The brand image of an organization is usually affected by the content it produces followed by user engagement and reaction.

Some of the things that affect the online reputation are as follows:

• Negative reviews

• Social media

• Poor campaigns

• Security breaches

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The rising prominence of online reputation can be assessed from the following data:

‍→ 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

→ 65% of consumers trust online search engines the most when conducting research on hotels.

‍The travel industry is one of the largest service industries in the world and an increasingly important one in the modern age. Thanks to the increasing growth of technology, more and more customers are choosing to book their travel online on a mobile phone or travel app.

The online travel booking market share is assumed to form around 63% of the estimated $1.2 trillion revenue of the travel industry. Thus, there has been a surge in popularity in the ORM as hotels have begun to realize its importance.

‍The online reputation can be divided into the following two parts:

‍• Understanding what’s being said about you online

• Actively working towards enhancing your hotel’s reputation

The plethora of options available for travelers worldwide has led the properties to understand the concept of hotel reputation as well as the significant resources being spent to constantly project a good brand image and maintain a strong virtual presence.

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What Does Hotel Reputation Management Include?

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The hotel business is very much susceptible to online reputation and customer reviews. A sound reputation of your hotel will have a direct impact on your hotel occupancy levels in the long run. Therefore, hotel reputation management is critical for the overall growth of the business.

If done correctly, practicing it can enhance brand value, increase repeated guests, and give a boost to hotel revenue. From the perspective of the customers, the hotel reviews provide them with a clear idea of the services and the amenities provided by the hotel so that they can make an informed booking decision.

‍Some of the features that make it an integral part of the business are as follows:

‍• Reputation Monitoring: Reputation management provides the opportunity to evaluate your issue followed by a reputation monitoring plan. It aims to create and maintain a positive reputation in the virtual domain.

• Reputation Repairing: The act of repairing reputation includes detecting negative content during the search results and addressing them if required. Addressing these issues usually helps in generating goodwill and creating a positive reputation.

• Reputation Building: Building a positive hotel reputation can help project a good brand image and attract more traffic to your websites. One of the ways to achieve this is by creating some positive content.

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How To Track Your Hotel’s Online Reputation

The hospitality industry is highly vulnerable to the impact of reputation management. Today’s travelers are empowered with technology to make lodging decisions based on a hotel’s online reputation.

While a good reputation goes a long way into establishing a successful relationship between a hotel and its guests, a bad reputation can leave a hotel in ruins. This is how you can keep a track of your ORM’s growth on various platforms:

• Online Reviews and Ratings: Online reviews are highly influential and usually represent consumer opinion. Responding to positive and negative feedback along with making smart business decisions based on the review insights can be some of the proactive steps that can be undertaken.

• Social Media Likes and Followers: Social media plays a critical role in influencing your prospective customers. A positive social media reputation helps you generate more audience and ideally a surge in revenue from the increased hotel bookings.

• Website Content and Optimization: Having additional features like AI-driven WebChat coupled with stellar content that can cater effectively to the target audience is one of the surefire ways to improve your hotel reputation and overall ranking. In other words, give them fewer or no reasons to abandon your website and not book with you.

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Why Is Reputation Management Significant For Hotels

Reputation management is important for all hotels, especially for the management of your online reputation:

• How travelers perceive, rate, review, share and search for information about your establishment directly affects the success of your hotel. Travelers have increasingly begun to depend on online reviews posted across various travel websites.

• However, most hotels are not able to optimally utilize this particular aspect of the modern travel market. Therefore, it is paramount for the hoteliers to not only understand the significance of the tremendous opportunity that lies within ORM but also take advantage of such tools to create a good online reputation while connecting with potential guests in the virtual domain.

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Benefits Of Maintaining A Good Reputation Online

It takes a lot of time and effort to establish a business and make it grow. Your services might be excellent and you might be satisfying your existing customers but there is a crucial thing that you need to look after to protect and fuel the growth of your business. In this digital world, maintaining your business’s reputation on the internet is critical.

With the presence of a plethora of options in the market, ORM has become imperative for businesses to observe, determine and shape the digital reputation of brands.

A simple search is often sufficient to gain knowledge about the reputation of a brand and is a critical factor in the decision-making process of booking a hotel for travelers. Some of the reasons why maintaining a good hotel reputation online are imperative to achieve success is provided in the following section:

• It helps in increasing sales: People research online for brands, services, and products before they make a final decision. Even before visiting a place, people rely on online reviews by people who have visited the place. Businesses with good online reviews tend to attract more people. Businesses with a bad reputation and those with maximum number of negative reviews, miss out on big sales. That’s why your brand needs to have positive reviews on the internet.•

It helps build credibility: Social media platforms have allowed us to give an opinion about everything. People prefer to use brands that they trust. A negative word about your brand will spread faster than a positive one. Again, no opinion at all on your business is a sign of unreliability and trust issues. But having an effective ORM strategy and addressing it right in time will help tackle that.

• It helps attract employees: Reviews not only attract customers but it is equally important in attracting employees. Having professional staff is a foundation of a successful workforce. A good online reputation drives applications in high volume for any job openings.

• It helps increase visibility: Online reviews, especially positive reviews, can give businesses plenty of opportunities to increase exposure and influence to prospects. Paying attention to online reviews is not only essential to managing your hotel reputation but to grow your business, too. Positive reviews also help in increasing the visibility of the brand and, in turn, help in attracting more customers. Although more traffic does not necessarily translate to more room bookings, it does increase the probability of increasing occupancy of your hotel rooms.

• It helps in maximizing your revenue: In the current highly competitive market and business environment, the way your brand is being perceived by people has a direct impact on the sales and revenue of your organization. Thus, it helps in maximizing revenue while simultaneously creating a good reputation.

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How Can I Improve My Property’s Reputation?

It is important to remember that reputation can be changed over time. Just as reputation can be tarnished, it can also be repaired for you to reap the benefits of having a positive online reputation.

It's important, and it's worth the time to keep it in the best possible shape. When exploring how to manage your hotel’s reputation online, here are some tactics to navigate this tricky landscape with a bit more ease. It’s important to put these tactics into a long-term hotel reputation management strategy by doing the needful:

• Send automated feedback surveys: Asking your guests directly regarding their experience at your hotel is expected to provide you with a better chance of collecting reviews. Sending automated feedback surveys to the guests is perhaps the easiest way to do this.

It is advisable to send a brief feedback survey to gauge the guest experience before asking directly for a review. This will help in addressing any unfortunate issues experienced by the guests along with garnering honest feedback.

This step can help in reducing the number of negative reviews even before they are posted online and can also help in mid-service recovery.

• Responding to the reviews: Responding to all the reviews is often considered to be as important as collecting them. According to TripAdvisor, 65% of users would rather book a hotel that responds to reviews and 85% of users say that their impression of a hotel improves when they read a good management response to a bad review.

This means that the majority of people care about your hotel reputation and how you deal with negative responses posted by them. A tactful response has the potential to turn the tide in your favor.

• Consistency is the key: A consistent and regular response mechanism is one of the most important and successful ORM strategies that can be employed by you. Limiting the number of people who are responsible for the task can help you maintain consistency and keep it crisp and to the point.

• Schedule time to respond regularly: Regularly responding to customer feedback is a major part of the consistency paradigm. Responding to feedback on time and regularly often helps in minimizing the gravity of the situation much before it gets out of hand.

• Integrate and automate: Delegating these tasks to technological boons such as online reputation management tools or reputation management software for hotels can help you save precious time and increase efficiency.

Automated solutions help you gather reviews from all sources on one platform, respond to reviews quickly, thereby allowing you to address more reviews and any issues as fast as possible.

The time saved through the automation of hotel reputation management, can be utilized to attend to your guests and drastically enhance the holistic experience as well as the impression of your hotel. Integrated reputation management for hotels also helps in managing communications and store the guest data seamlessly.

• Provide a seamless guest experience: All the above-mentioned points will come to nothing if your guests leave the hotel dissatisfied with the stay and your service. Hence mapping the hotel guest journey the right way to anticipate the needs of the guests from right before they arrive at your doorstep is a one-stop solution to all your problems. This helps you prepare accordingly and personalize the experience for each of your guests.

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Conclusion

It has become quintessential for hotels to deliver a seamless and perfect guest experience to each of their guests, and while doing so, they need to portray this particular aspect to their potential guests in the virtual domain.

This is significant, as a positive or negative reputation for a hotel can often decide the future of the hotel in the long run. Hotels must realize its importance and invest resources in this particular domain to gain that competitive edge and enjoy its immense benefits in the future for an excellent online hotel reputation and visibility.

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