Practically every travel site you visit today uses a star system to allow travelers to participate in the future image of the hotel brand. These days, you almost can't have a successful hotel business without positive online reviews. My wife and I frequently skim through reviews and ratings to compare pros and cons of a particular abode before booking. Although we expect the occasional negative comment (some reviews may be biased for one reason or another), we do consider the overall rating and how it compares to its peers as part of the process. According to recent StatisticBrain statistics, the average hotel has about 238 online reviews and the percentage of travelers who believe reviews are important is a staggering 81%. The funny thing is that it's actually pretty easy to make your guests happy and bring in positive reviews for your hotel. The key is in understanding the three factors where customer satisfaction can make a difference and your rating can improve across the board.
How to Get Good Hotel Reviews
1. Be Customer Focus
Hotel owners, managers and staff members label themselves as being in the hospitality industry. Their focus is on helping guests and realizing the ultimate goal of making their customers feel welcome, when in a strange city. A Customer-focused team is the prime directive that will solve any problems. Breakdowns happen, but how you respond to them is what can set you apart from your competitor. Having a culture that promotes customer satisfaction at every level, and most of all, propagating this concept by rewarding employees with incentives for accomplishing this goal, can be key to good customer service, and a major part of achieving good reviews.
2. Keep It Clean
Impeccable cleanliness can cause your online appraisal rating to skyrocket. Ideally, modernizing your decor or updating older rooms or hallway carpets, for example, will improve perception of first impressions. But, if you don't have a repetitive, effective and measureable process for keeping your environment clean and in good working state, even a new bathroom counter will quickly lose its shine. Taking this into consideration, cleanliness beats out modernization every time. Yes, some people can nit pick over your outdated decor, but if your hotel is impeccably clean, visitors will notice. Remember that those extremely quaint, but sometimes older, boutique hotels are extremely popular and get higher than average reviews than most.
3. Use Technology
With the plethora of work order systems available on the market these days, there are no excuses as to why your hotel should not have an official way of managing requests for issues that come up during a guest's visit. Nothing can make a guest feel more unwanted than ignoring his or her service request needs, so if your work order system situation is sub-standard, then that's something that should be addressed. However, work order tracking is not the only thing that goes into a facility maintenance software. Source out a system that has an effective way to manage and track Preventive Maintenance Schedules as well. Part of keeping a hotel clean and in good working condition is the daily management of preventive tasks that go a long way in reducing the amount of breakdowns that may occur. Keeping up with scheduled preventive tasks, as well as responding effectively to work orders, should lay the groundwork for improving your star rating for years to come.
There is no magic formula; these are simple, well known concepts. Much too often, failing hotel operators, who may for example be focused on cost-cutting initiatives, could be ignoring these three basic principles that would help their online image improve and as a result turn things around for their hotel. Once put into practice, positive online hotel reviews are sure to follow, it's just as simple as that.
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