Guest post by Revinate

A few years ago, naysayers said that social media was just a fad. Today there are hundreds of millions of active users on Facebook and Twitter, not to mention major review sites and OTA’s. The rapid adoption of social media has forever changed the way people communicate and discover.

With so many ways to share information with ever-expanding networks of friends, user-generated content has become the go-to source for recommendations, eclipsing even search as the most important avenue for ‘discovery’. In fact, recommendations from personal acquaintances and consumer opinions posted online are the most trusted forms of advertising, according to the latest Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey.

The Changing Landscape for Hoteliers

It’s no surprise that social media is dramatically changing many aspects of hotel operations. On the marketing front, hotels that continue to rely exclusively on glossy brochures and staged photos to sell rooms will soon find themselves in trouble. Why? People who want information about a hotel will visit review sites first. Even if they intend to eventually visit your site, they will see guest reviews on search engines before they arrive. Here is an example from Google:

Review sites continue to grow at an exponential rate. The largest review site, TripAdvisor, has 34 million monthly visitors and more than 35 million reviews and opinions. And reviews have become increasingly important on OTA’s and other sites such as Yelp, Yahoo Travel, TravelPost, and Expedia. These sites continue to attract larger and larger audiences while they grow their review databases.

Regaining Control

The solution is not to throw up your hands and leave marketing to the masses. Keeping your head in the sand is no strategy at all. Instead, you need a solution that will turn online reviews and social media into a competitive advantage. Hotels need to embrace the new channels that have opened up and use them to drive incremental revenue, create stronger guest relationships and gain market share. If you don’t know what people are saying about your hotel on review sites, you are missing a huge opportunity that will impact all facets of your business.

Social Media is the Key to Measuring (and Improving) Guest Satisfaction

Online reviews and social media have now become the most important measure of guest satisfaction. Compared to traditional internal surveys, reviews and social media feedback is immediate, free-form and public, influencing all travel shoppers. In this way, reviews and comments about your hotel immediately and directly impact your bookings. Harnessing this explosion of social media content is impossible to do manually, but the right solution makes it easy.

The Value of a Social Media Solution

Online reviews are driving sales. PhoCusWright research shows that OTA shoppers who visit hotel review pages in OTAs are twice as likely to convert. If there is negative feedback about your hotel you need to address it to ensure you are taking advantage of this powerful conversion vehicle.

Additionally, you must monitor what is being said about you in order to keep your guests coming back. The hotel industry spends millions of dollars each year to measure guest satisfaction. Online reviews, when properly aggregated and sorted, provide even more detail than traditional GSS. And it’s public! True “Social Media Scorecards” from Revinate can be used for training and operational improvements that will increase guest satisfaction and loyalty. Furthermore, knowing what is being said about your competition gives you the intelligence you need to compete effectively and gain share.

Revinate Makes it Easy

So how do you stay on top of the tidal wave of reviews that are coming in every day across dozens of OTAs and review sites, thousands of travel blogs and millions of Web pages? You could task someone with checking the sites every day but manual searches are incredibly time consuming and ineffective. In addition, simply keeping up with reviews doesn’t allow you to look at data over time, track your success or learn enough from the data to act on it. For that, you need Revinate.

Revinate is a software service that brings order to the chaos of guest reviews, online reputation and social media marketing. Revinate brings structure, performance tracking & actionable guidance to today’s stream of social media, which is now more influential than traditional marketing. Don’t be a naysayer. Go to www.revinate.com to learn more.

—

An exclusive group of companies will demonstrate travel’s most innovative and impactful new products and technologies live on-stage at The Travel Innovation Summit. An audience of travel executives, investors and media will judge the demonstrations in real time, choosing the innovators that will advance to pitch the industry at Center Stage. The four finalists will each have Five Minutes of Fame to convince a panel of travel luminaries to name them the “PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit Winner.”

Register for The PhoCusWright Conference to experience “what’s next” first and firsthand. Think you’re it? If your company has launched a new travel product based on truly innovative technology with the potential to shake things up, apply now.

Share