Hotel Reputation Management – Set Yourself Up for Success

Hotel reputation management is crucial to ensuring the long-term success of your hotel. It requires a multi-prong approach that dutifully addresses key areas and demands an adequate allocation of resources. 

While establishing a favorable reputation is a must for any hotel, maintaining and managing that reputation is equally as important. Doing so involves a meticulous and thorough approach while successful execution will yield tangible results of increased revenue and broader public awareness. 

In what follows, we’ll take a look at the various components of hospitality reputation management and cover the best methods to implement these strategies into your daily operations. Read on to learn all you need to know about hospitality reputation management! 

What is Hotel Reputation Management? 

Proper hotel reputation management is exactly what its name implies – monitoring, managing, and maintaining your hotel’s reputation. This requires astute attention to what people are saying about your hotel on review sites, social media platforms, and other online domains. Furthermore, it requires consistent online engagement with clientele and utilizing pertinent marketing strategies such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), effective storytelling, digital marketing, software implementation, and various other endeavors. 

5 Benefits of Hotel Online Reputation Management 

Engaging in the practice of managing your hotel’s online reputation is absolutely essential for success in the hotel business. Doing so will wonderfully serve your hotel for the better and provide substantial benefits. Let’s examine five of these key advantages. 

1. Increased Revenue

It may seem obvious, but it must be said: a hotel’s reputation has a direct influence on revenue. The better the reputation, the higher likelihood of increased revenue. As such, it is imperative that you carefully tend to your hotel’s reputation in order to foster further revenue growth. 

2. Improved Customer Relations 

Your hotel’s reputation is forged by customer experience. Therefore, it is essential to continuously seek to improve customer relations through meaningful engagement, spectacular customer service, and adroit attention to customer needs. All of these will serve to bolster customer relations and, in turn, produce a positive reputation for your hotel. 

3. Brand Awareness 

Your hotel’s brand is a vital component of your overall level of success. Your brand speaks to who you are, what you believe in, and how you wish to be perceived by the general public. Hotel reputation management aids significantly in the preservation and growth of your hotel’s brand and effectively aligns your hotel’s brand with sentiments of positivity. 

4. Separation from Competitors 

With over 187,000 hotels worldwide, it is undeniable that the hotel industry is quite crowded and highly competitive. Customers all over the world are presented with numerous options when considering a hotel, and the need to stand out in a crowded market is paramount. Knowing this, managing your hotel’s reputation is absolutely necessary to separate yourself from your competitors and secure bookings. 

5. The attraction of Top-Level Talent

Establishing and managing a shining reputation for your hotel will make it a popular destination not only for travelers but for professionals, too. Professionals working in the hotel industry will view your establishment as a desirable employer and the hiring of such individuals will only further your hotel’s growth and success. 

10 Ways to Improve Your Hotel’s Reputation 

The longevity of your hotel is directly related to its reputation. Knowing this, all steps must be taken to attach an exemplary reputation to your hotel. To accomplish this feat, we’ve compiled 10 invaluable tips that will collectively aid in boosting your hotel’s reputation. 

1. Set a Strategy 

Proper hotel resort reputation management requires a thoughtfully considered strategy. Multiple ingredients are present in a holistic approach, and each needs to be carefully executed so as to be complementary to the whole. 

Take the necessary time to decide which tactics to implement and how to do so in a thorough manner. Create goals and establish milestones within those goals in order to track progress. Utilize your team and set assignments that play to individuals’ strengths – leveraging talent in the right way will yield tremendous results. 

2. Know Yourself 

A large portion of success comes from being self-aware. Though it’s not always easy to be critical when self-reflecting, you must identify your areas of weakness and address them accordingly. Also, be sure not to operate in a silo – seek the help of others who excel where you may fall short. 

Pinpointing and actively working on improving weak points is vitally important to bolstering your hospitality reputation management. 

3. Celebrate and Value Your Strengths 

In the same vein, it is also significant to recognize your strengths and appropriately celebrate those areas in which you thrive. Be sure to reinforce your strengths and keep them at the forefront of your operations – you want the general public to readily recognize what you do best. 

4. Survey Your Guests and Leverage the Feedback

Customer insights are fundamentally crucial to gaining valuable knowledge of how your hotel is perceived by the public. Surveying your guests offers the insight necessary to fix any common areas of concern, solidify customer satisfaction, and plan for the future. 

With that said, it can be a challenge to entice customers to take action and complete your survey. Consider attaching a benefit to doing so – such as a percentage off their next stay, a complimentary meal, or something in a similar vein. 

5. Respond to Online Reviews

Online reviews are undeniably influential in customers’ purchasing decisions. In fact, 97% of consumers consider customer reviews before finalizing a purchase. As such, engaging with customer reviews and responding in a timely manner needs to be a top priority. 

Doing so accomplishes several key objectives. First, it exemplifies the fact that you care about your customers and value their feedback. Second, a prompt response indicates that you operate an efficient and organized institution and allocate the necessary resources to customer satisfaction. Finally, it presents an opportunity to elevate yourself above your competitors – potential guests will surely be considering several hotel options, and exhibiting exemplary customer service is a great method of standing out from your competitors. 

6. Be Empathetic and Open to Criticism 

This may be easier said than done, but it is nonetheless vital that you remain receptive to negative feedback. Every single business – no matter the industry – contains certain areas that should be honed and improved; and, frankly, your hotel is no different. 

How you respond to criticism says quite a bit about your hotel and its core values. Always be respectful (whether or not you consider the criticism to be valid) and engage in reasonable measures to fix the issue. Ideally, this will not only pacify the disgruntled customer but will also indicate to other potential guests that you believe in making their stay as agreeable as possible. 

7. Leverage Storytelling 

Proper storytelling is a vital aspect of both reputation management and your overall marketing efforts. When done correctly, storytelling informs customers of who you are, what you stand for, and what your mission is. In other words, it is the process of bringing your brand to life. Leverage your storytelling to further entice customers to visit your hotel and, thereby, foster customer loyalty. 

For more information on the power of storytelling in the hotel industry, be sure to dive into this incredible piece that examines the benefits of telling your hotel’s story. 

8. Invest in Digital Marketing 

Due to the popularity of social media platforms, it should come as no surprise that 70% of Americans are active on at least one form of social media (such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) Therefore, it is imperative that you put forth an appreciable degree of effort into advertising on these social media platforms. Indeed, it will keep your hotel relevant, boost customer interaction, resulting in new leads, and positively influence your hotel’s reputation.

To learn more about how digital marketing can help you, read our guide dedicated to SEO Reputation Management.

9. Develop Your Brand 

First, let’s clearly identify exactly what a brand is. As is precisely stated by Market Business News, a brand can be defined as the following: 

“A brand is the image and personality of a product or service that a business provides. A product’s features, such as logos or slogans, make it unique and different.” 

To succeed in the crowded hotel market, you must develop and maintain a distinctive brand. Your brand creates awareness, engenders customer loyalty, and carves out a niche in the broader marketplace. 

For further insights into branding, and the management thereof, check out our remarkably helpful brand reputation management guide.

10. Deploy Hotel Reputation Management Software 

Properly managing the reputation of your hotel is an involved process that demands considerable attention and resources. Thankfully, the process of doing so can be significantly aided by particular software. 

These programs will actively scan the web to identify reviews – both positive and negative – of your hotel, allowing you to expeditiously respond. This can save you an ample amount of time (continuously and manually scanning the myriad review site for mentions of your hotel is simply unreasonable), thereby permitting you the opportunity to commit your attention to other pressing matters. 

How to Choose the Right Hotel Reputation Management Software 

Incorporating this beneficial tool into your hotel reputation management strategy is a no-brainer. There are, however, numerous options to choose from and you may be contemplating the right one to choose. 

In order to take some of the guesswork out of your purchase, let’s examine the capabilities that should be present in the software. The best hotel management software utilities include the following –

1. Necessary documentation to solicit online reviews 
2. The ability to scan review sites to collect customer reviews for examination
3. Effective management platforms to provide data on online reviews 
4. Continuous monitoring of the web to instantaneously notify you of mentions of your hotel 

The above checklist should serve as your guide when weighing different hotel resort reputation management software options. With that said, let’s make things even simpler by providing you with a list of some of the options available.

3 of the Best Hotel Reputation Management Software Choices

1. TrustYou

TrustYou provides vital insights into customer experience by thoroughly evaluating customer reviews. The resulting knowledge allows you to address areas of concern and rectify any customer complaints. Doing so will result in customer appreciation, thereby increasing your hotel’s reputation. 

2. Revinate

Featuring easy-to-navigate operation, Revinate is perfect for those who don’t consider themselves tech-savvy. This is not to say that it doesn’t offer fantastic utility; in fact, Revinate is a fully realized management software tool. Combining customer surveys, analytics, automated marketing, and reputation management, Revinate will allow you to better understand your clientele, thus driving increased growth. 

3. GuestRevue

GuestRevue is heavily focused on the learning process – what your guests are saying about your hotel and how to respond accordingly. To achieve this, GuestRevue includes instant notifications of any online mentions, integration with TripAdvisor and Google, and data reports – not only of your property but those of your competitors as well. 

All of the above are viable options to consider when shopping for hotel reputation management software. Do yourself a favor and invest sooner rather than later – it will save you time, effort, and money! 

Hiring a Hotel Reputation Management Company 

In conjunction with software, it is highly recommended you hire a professional company to manage your hotel’s reputation. As a hotelier, you no doubt have enough on your plate. Therefore, it is absolutely worth your while to outsource the management of your hotel’s reputation to a team of experts. A hotel reputation management company will surely make your life easier and allow you to focus intently on other pressing matters. 

Hotel Reputation Management: You Can’t Afford Not To! 

Succeeding in the hotel business requires a herculean effort. With enormous competition, you absolutely must take advantage of every resource available to stake your claim as a hotelier. As such, managing your hotel’s reputation is paramount and you would do well to invest in software and professional help to meet your goals. Reach out to the team at Mediaboom today for even more valuable insights!