The reviews are in, and TripAdvisor is a bigger hit than ever with travelers. The world’s largest travel site attracted 40 million visitors worldwide in July, up 60% from the beginning of the year, according to comScore, and carries more than 35 million reviews of 450,000 hotels in 23 countries.
But, do lodging property reviews, especially anonymous reviews, help or hurt an individual property or the lodging industry as a whole?
HotelMarketing.com writer Daniel Edward Craig goes directly to the source – TripAdvisor co-founder and CEO Stephen Kaufer, for his perspective. He talks candidly about why TripAdvisor will continue to allow anonymous reviews and why hoteliers always get the last word.
Read the complete Q&A interview here. (This article is password protected for WH&LA lodging members only. If you need help logging in, contact Michelle in the WH&LA office for your user ID and password).
Online Reviews: To Respond or Not Respond?
May 21, 2010 in Marketing & Social Media | 1 comment
UPDATE: From 4Hoteliers.com, May 6th: Best Practices for Responding to Online Hotel Reviews, Part I.
and the second part, posted May 20th: Best Practices for Responding to Online Hotel Reviews, Part 2.
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UPDATE: From eHotelier.com, March 29th: Tips for Managing Online Hotel Reviews: An Interview With TripAdvisor
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UPDATE, March 23rd: USA Today’s HOTEL CHECK-IN section just posted this as well: Hotel managers monitor online critiques to improve service
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Back in July of 2009 we did a post called “Good Tips for Bad Reviews“. One of our most popular topics, we still often take inquiries from members suddenly facing negative guest reviews online. We already know that, no matter how hard we try, we can’t please all the people all the time & bad days happen…
So, here’s my question:
Do you have a strategy for handling guest feedback in person, over the phone, or in writing to your establishment AND do you have a plan for dealing with these same type of comments when made online?
If you answered no, why not?
Conversations about your place are happening, whether you’re part of them or not. So, in the spirit of encouraging you to be an active participant in those discussions, we’ve pulled together three more articles worth checking out:
Finally, this article was originally included in our first post, but I wanted to highlight it one more time because it details a PROACTIVE approach to online guest feedback: Beating negative hotel reviews: An action plan for proactive reputation management.
It’s your turn for feedback – let us have it in the comments section below!
Tags: customer comments, guest feedback, online reviews, TripAdvisor, Yelp