Everyone has had to face criticism in their professional lives, but not many of us are subject to nasty, negative and sometimes completely untrue remarks on our performance posted for millions of others to read on the web. For years now sites such as TripAdvisor and Yelp have enabled consumers to post feedback from their experiences, both positive and negative, online for others to read. And read they do, consumers overwhelmingly trust these user-generated review sites more than information from a property or company’s own site.
Yet, what do you do if your business/ property is the victim of negative online reviews? Check out the following articles:
- It Used to Be That an Unhappy Hotel Guest Would Tell 3 Others, Now They Tell 3 million (With Less Effort)
- Beating negative hotel reviews: An action plan for proactive reputation management
- How Companies Should Respond To Negative Reviews
Finally, just last week, this interview with TripAdvisor CEO Steve Kaufer was posted by SDNN.com: Can TripAdvisor reviews be trusted? Find out who’s gaming the system.
Makes you wonder how wise the owl really is…



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