Best Practice Guide
5 Easy Steps: 1. Respond to reviews, both positive and negative 2. Include review content on your website 3. Make use of Rich Snippets 4. Encourage guests to share their reviews on social media 5. Incorporate the guest feedback on your hotel website
How To Incorporate Reviews Into Your Hotel Marketing Strategy Best Practice Guide
Making the most of guest feedback Guest feedback is the thing that can make or break your hotel marketing strategy. Especially when it comes to hospitality, reviews are something that help or harm the success of your hotel. They are able to encourage more bookings or prevent
travelers from booking. The good news is, once you learn how to
manage guest reviews, you can use them in your favor to
transform guests into ambassadors for your hotel.
TrustYou, the world’s largest guest feedback platform, is on a mission to improve the travel experience, from finding the right hotel to having the perfect stay. The company works with hotels, destinations, and travel websites to make that happen. TrustYou analyzes hundreds of millions of travel reviews scattered across a vast, fragmented market and transforms this content into actionable insights and data visualizations for 500,000 hotels. This enables travel sites to improve the trip planning process and hotels to offer the best experience to their guests.
Best Practice Guide
Here are 5 tips on how to incorporate guest reviews into your hotel marketing strategy:
1. Respond to reviews, both positive and negative This is probably the most important factor when it comes to making good use of customer feedback. Ignoring a client’s opinion and/or suggestion can make them feel unappreciated or that their experience in your hotel is not your top priority. Regardless of what type of review you are facing, you need to take responsibility for the good and for the not-so-good. This will not only show your previous guests that you care, but it is also a simple yet effective way of advertising the fact that you value your customers. You would also let them know that you take their input into consideration, in order to meet their needs and expectations. Here is an example on how to address critics in the best way: Horrible stay…
I wanted to enjoy my stay here. I really did. However, the hotel was a disappointment from the moment we arrived. One of the elevators in the lobby wasn’t working, so we had to wait forever to get upstairs with all our luggage. Then, there weren’t enough towels in the room, and our coffee at breakfast wasn’t even warm.
Here is a great response: Dear Jenny, First, I want to thank you for your feedback. While I wish you had a better experience, it is feedback like this that we learn from and use to improve. We work hard to deliver an exceptional guest experience, and it’s apparent in this case, we fell short. At the time you were staying with us, one of our elevators was out of service for routine maintenance. For the inconvenience it caused, I am sorry. The safety of our guests is a priority and such service is an unavoidable necessity that should have been better explained. If you give us a chance to earn back your trust, I can assure you that your breakfast will be on time and your towels will be plentiful. I would be happy to make your reservation personally and and see to it that you enjoy the experience that so many of our guests have grown so fond of. All the best, Sam Jones, General Manager
Best Practice Guide
2. Include review content on your website Nowadays, the most common thing before making a purchase is checking the reviews of the product, in order to determine is the buy is worth it or not. However, a previous study of ours revealed that summarized review content is easier to consume than full text reviews. This is why you should integrate this type of review content onto your own website. First of all, integrated reviews offer travelers that visit the website a quick way of evaluating the key attributes of the establishment, in order to form an opinion and make a booking decision. Also, when trying to advertise a hotel’s reputation, there’s no better place to start than “home”, on a hotel’s own official website.
These benefits are easy to obtain by using TrustYou Meta-Review and TrustScore widgets. After signing up, we provide the necessary code to copy and paste into your the backend of your website.
Best Practice Guide
3. Make use of Rich Snippets Rich Snippets are not something that you casually mention in an everyday conversation, but they are one of Google’s best features when it comes to visibility. If you aren’t already familiar with this terminology, rich snippets provide extra information underneath your page title and URL in the search engine results, helping to promote your hotel’s meta-review. And by displaying your reputation out in plain site, straight on the search engine page, you take an extra step in making sure that travelers don’t scroll past your hotel.
Keep in mind that rich snippets can only be added for a score that is visible to the visitors on your website, by using structured data markup. Most OTAs are often displaying rich snippets of their own information, so it’s important for hotels to keep up, in order to generate more direct bookings. To get more familiar with rich snippets and ways of using them, you can start here.
Best Practice Guide
4. Encourage guests to share their reviews on social media There’s no denying that social media is is one of the most effective pieces of a hotel marketing strategy. By taking the initiative of using a survey, you not only make sure that the reviews that you get are verified, but you can also use them for social media exposure. Survey tools help hotels collect post-stay feedback from their guests and focus on those exact features that need to be analyzed. TrustYou Stars is one example of such tool, which also enables sharing the guest feedback on Google and Facebook, therefore allowing them to influence a large number of travelers.
Best Practice Guide
5. Incorporate guest feedback on your hotel website While it is important to launch your guests’ feedback into the vast sea of social media, this goes the other way around, too. A very good way of showing appreciation towards clients’ reviews is to incorporate them onto your hotel’s website. This is the exact purpose that was attributed to the Social Gallery Widget feature of TrustYou Analytics & Radar. By using this unique feature, you can choose the best visual content that you wish to display on the hotel website, through the Social Gallery widget. Integrating social content is a simple step that can add emotional value. It also gives insights into experiences and personal stories and that is something that encourages travelers to book directly.
Best Practice Guide
Key Takeaways Reputation management solutions help hotels incorporate these best practices into their marketing strategy. To start turning guest reviews into hotel bookings, sign up for a free 14-day trial of TrustYou Analytics. Feel free to contact us at
[email protected] if you have any further questions!