With almost 98% of travelers trusting and visiting online review sites when making a purchase, the answer to this question is a definite "YES". It is more important than ever to keep abreast of your online reputation.
According to a recent world tourism survey, a tourist is five times more likely to choose a hotel with higher ratings over its equally priced competitor. An even more interesting fact is that even a small point increase in ratings on trip advisor can enhance a hotel's reputation allowing it to raise room rates by up to 10% thus in turn increasing revenue.
Over 160 new reviews are being published on TripAdvisor every minute and it is no surprise that all hoteliers are now keen to improve their rankings. Since older reviews do not add much weight because people would only see few top reviews, one way to achieve higher rankings is to encourage guests to leave new reviews. You can send guests post-stay emails encouraging them to review their stay to keeps new inflow of reviews coming hence maintaining your ranking.
Getting and maintaining reviews is good but at the same time most important factor is responding to these reviews - good or bad! According to trip advisor 89% of prospective customers believe that a good suitable response to a bad review will ENHANCE their impression of the hotel.
In such a fast and ever changing industry, reviews are here to stay and have marked itself as a new booming segment within the industry of online reputation management opening numerous new job opening within the hotel.
One can see that more than half of the negative reviews left on Trip Advisor were a result of poor service - which can without doubt be improved by providing training staff to handle queries differently, delivering a memorable guest experience while ensuring all staff members appreciate the importance of exceptional customer service.
A lot of big OTA's like booking.com, expedia to name a few, now have their own review ratings alongside trip advisor's and are rapidly becoming important players in this online reputation race.
With higher review ratings always comes better ARR and increased number of bookings - mycloudhospitality understand the importance of online reviews and the impact they can have on your business and hence have integrated this reputation management tool within the PMS. We are proud to be partners with trip advisor and now you can send guests post stay emails with one click of a button from within the PMS.
To register your interest in understanding how we can help you build a strong online reputation using our PMS please click here
Alternatively, we would be extremely happy to arrange a personal one to one discussion on how mycloudhospitality services can drive more direct bookings and increase revenue within your hotel using a single Hotel PMS.
Please call us on +44-074-1844-8130 or email on info@mycloudhospitality.com