Modern devices and their effectiveness have remarkably changed the perspective of today’s population. It is hard to imagine youngsters without any modern gadgets these days. They do everything by searching online, getting information, reading reviews, and then taking the decisions thereafter. Similarly, the trend for the Hospitality Industry shows online reviews are having a huge impact on hotel booking. The Internet gives them the option to see room features, hotel services, compare prices, and read reviews. So when it comes to hotel booking in faraway countries, these reviews are the only way to understand the experience of these unknown establishments. They choose the hotel based on their budget, luxuries, and online reviews they have read from various profiles.
Significance of Online Reviews in the Hospitality Industry
Guest stays can be short or long depending on the nature of their visit. Here staff must take responsibility to make sure the guest gets the preferential treatments and leave fully satisfied. Reviews provide elaborate information about the Guest experience during their visit to the respective arrangements. This allows hotels to understand guest behavior, likes, dislikes, and preferences.
Two main possibilities emerge from their stay and experience of services. Guests will either give positive reviews or criticize services for their ineffectiveness. Engagement is the key here. Hotels executives need to respond quickly for both in a polite and professionally manner. Although you can’t change their perspective now still you must let them feel and assure that their voices are heard and inputs are acknowledged to make changes in the arrangements.
But the largest will be of a group that is just not interested to give reviews at all. This is the reason the organization asks almost every guest to give reviews and share their feedback. Hotels must send them mails, messages, and notification to share their experience for trying to get their engagement. More inputs one can gain from the guest better the results will be.
Once you have the reviews, Hotels and other establishments must distribute them in every measure to attract more guests towards their establishment. These reviews are used strategically for SEO and social media to enhance your hotel reputation and give users assurance of their quality service.
How Online Reviews benefits Hospitality Industry?
These online Reviews can bring a lot of benefits for the Hospitality industry.
- With Positive Reviews, Hotels are bound to get more bookings right away as the conversion rate goes up.
- These also establish trust between guests and Hotels for their effective services and enhance user base
simultaneously. - These reviews also tell you about the choice, likes, and dislikes of Hotel Services that organizations can
use to further customize to build a better environment for guests.
How Online Reviews benefits Guests?
The modern generation is now more aware of these reviews than ever. These reviews bring a lot of satisfaction for Guest in terms of
- Connecting with top hospitality brands directly and establish trust
- Getting their voice heard
- Helping other guests to choose the right hospitality partner for their next stay
Part of the SEO/Digital promotion
These reviews are an effective way of promoting on various platforms online. Even the major search engines use these reviews as one of their marking signals in the Search Engine Results Page(SERP). Today digital marketing has now become an important part of the industry to enhance hotel booking so these reviews need to be carefully handled and managed to build their promotional strategies to find new customers for a future booking.
Facing the Negative Reviews
Often we see guests leave a critical or strong negative review for specific service that might affect the business for a long time. Hotels executives need to be polite and professional in dealing specially with these guests. Try to give them prompt replies and responses to give them the right attention they deserve. And if possible try to solve the issue personally and persuade them to transform those negatives into positives.
Sometimes there are misleading or fake reviews often generated by competitors. Someone paid for negative publicity, an old member of your staff and anyone with a grudge can tarnish the image of your organization brand. Hotels need to connect with these review boards and platforms to remove them as soon as possible. Hotels must have accounts on review sites and get notified for every review posted to their engagement with guests.
In this ever-evolving digital age, keeping guests satisfied should be the primary motive of Hospitality. Hotels and other organization must give preference for guests in making the stay comfortable in every aspect. For better reviews, it is necessary that all the strategies, services, and planning must be done with guest satisfaction at its center.
MyHotelLine offers a dedicated Guest Review Management module to manage feedback from clients and sharing them automatically on multi-platforms integrated Hotel PMS, Restaurant POS, Booking Engine, Channel manager, and Mobility options to enjoy the uniform experience on all devices in this digital age. You can also build customized forms and questionnaires to include inside your guest feedback.
Conclusion:
With the digitization of this contemporary age, the internet is now the biggest way of booking in the Hospitality industry. These online reviews, feedback, and comments from guests provide an insight into the services and value offered by Hotels to other guests. Although many of these fake reviews are being generated at a quite high rate still real guest count is much higher. These reviews are part of the Brand promotion now and often come below them Search engine or OTA searches. With Hotel PMS you can further customize them to ask specific questions and manage them automatically with their profiles. The hotel must use these reviews effectively to improve their guest booking from multiple resources.