Respond to Guest Reviews to Strengthen Your Online Reputation & Increase Bookings

by Myra Allen VP Business Development at IDS Next

For a guest facing service industry like hotel business, responding to guests’ feedback is crucial. If you reply to guests’ feedback, it would project you (your hotel) as a guest friendly property. Now this is a good thing for you as it enhances your brand value. Additionally, it is one of the best ways to improve customer satisfaction and guest loyalty post-stay. This is mainly because, when a hotel’s management responses to both bad and good reviews posted by guests, it improves perceptions of a hotel and impacts purchasing decisions of future guests.

Why reviews are so important?

Guest feedback (user generated content) written all over hundreds of review sites allow potential buyers to gain insight into a hotel’s brand value. To be more precisely, it lets customers know about a hotel’s level of guest services, quality of offering and amenities. They get to know about all these before even booking their stay. Now, if they find maximum number of negative feedback written on your property, your hotel’s brand, reputation and business will surely go for a toss. But if they get to read good things about a hotel, they are most likely to book their stay. So, it is clear that guest reviews do influence the buying decision of potential buyers.

Since all these activities right from a feedback written by a guest and response from the hotel happens over online platforms, it is also referred as ‘Online Reputation Management’. It is the process of observing and manipulating the image of your hotel throughout the web. In order to have a better control over your hotel’s online reputation/brand value, you should know how to handle guest feedback.

Positive or negative – you got to respond to all feedback

It is important for you to respond to both positive and negative reviews. Reacting or replying to both types of feedback needs to be done quite professionally and in a timely manner as it helps minimizing the possible damage done by negative reviews. While positive feedback is good for your business, negative feedback can act adversely. So, undesirable reviews should be handled carefully and should be considered as useful tool to improve quality of your hotel. In such cases, it is advisable to engage in a meaningful conversation with a guest who writes negative reviews. By talking to your guests (both past and potential guests) you can build up your image as the one who really values their feedback. You need to show your guests that you really empathize with them and you are willing to do everything to give them best of the class services during their stay.

Review IDS Next’s Online Reputation Management Solution

IDS Next’s online reputation management solution is the ultimate hospitality technology solution that can help hotels across size and location build up their brand value. It lets hoteliers know what is being said about their properties. Hoteliers adopting this solution can access and monitor guest feedback from across 250 plus review sites in more than 20 languages. They can also revert to those reviews from a single dashboard. Users can also integrate positive reviews to increase traffic to their hotel’s websites. This helps them generate more direct bookings through their proprietary/brand website. Most importantly, this smart solution helps you to improve level of your guest services so that they keep coming back to your property. And having repeat guests is a great way to grow bookings at your hotel.

To know more about us and our products, please visit our website http://www.idsnext.com/