By Manisha Pathak
Have you ever wondered what is that one factor that plays a huge role in your traveler’s decision-making process – reviews, website, ads or travel magazines? If you ask your guests on what basis they selected your hotel the next time they walk in and I am sure majority of them will say ‘reading the virtues of your hotel online’. Recommendations by other travelers who have stayed at your hotel generate higher levels of trust than mere advertisements and other marketing tactics.
Given the fact that travelers are highly dependent on Internet and gain information from reviews posted by other travelers, there are higher chances of them converting into bookers after reading a review. Not only that, reviews help your hotel rank higher on search engines too. Here’s why you should be focusing more on increasing guest reviews.
Reviews are important for both travelers and hoteliers – for travelers to gain trust in the property and make a booking and for hotels to understand what their guests feel about them and their service. The hotel industry is becoming more competitive by the day. A major contributor to this is TripAdvisor, which gives small independent hotels a platform to compete with larger brands. TripAdvisor has emerged as the ‘most trusted online review site’, attracting 65 million people every month who book a hotel based solely on the guest reviews.
Reviews also affect the ranking of your hotel. Research by Cornell University suggests that improving a hotel’s TripAdvisor rating by 1 point increases your hotel’s odds of being selected by 14% and it also allows you to increase the price by 11.2% (without the risk of losing guests).
There are three main factors that can affect your hotel’s ranking on TripAdvisor – quality of reviews, number of reviews and recency of reviews. So what’s the simplest way to garner maximum reviews? Many hotels would say they request reviews from their checked-out guests through emails or during the check out process, but what’s the guarantee? What if they forget to review? What is your staff is unable to get a review from them?
How about an easier, automated way to get reviews from the recently checked-out guests? Moreover, timely reminders for the forgetful ones?
TripAdvisor provides a simple and free tool to collect reviews from the recently checked-out guests, so your hotel doesn’t have to scout for reviews anymore! What’s even better is that this review collection process can be automated with the help of the hotel’s technology provider or property management system.
Hotelogix is conducting a webinar ‘How to Maximize Reviews on TripAdvisor’ that will help small and independent hoteliers understand how reviews influence travelers, discover free review collection tools, unlock the power of automation and learn from other hotels’ success stories.
Click here to register for the webinar.
