TALK BIG
It’s never been easier for a customer to critique your services, with a proliferation of online review tools available at their fingertips. Ben Walker explains the best technology for managing and responding to this feedback
I
n 2000 TripAdvisor started operating from a small office above a pizza shop in Needham, Massachusetts. Since then, a large eco-system of ancillary businesses has sprung up to help operators process and manage online reviews. Globally, travellers wrote nearly 95 million hotel reviews last year, according to a survey by hotel customer relationship management (CRM) provider Revinate. It’s a staggering number, most definitely big data territory, although the signs are that the review-writing craze is slowing down. TripAdvisor still attracts the lion’s share of
controversy, but the same can’t be said for the number of hotel reviews, which fell by 21% last year. In first place is Google with 30.1 million in 2018, followed by
Booking.com in second place (28.3 million reviews). The huge surge in Google reviews is a relatively new phenom- enon, showing that the market is changing. Without the Google posts, the overall number of hotel reviews would have dropped last year. That’s not to say that hoteliers and restau- rateurs should take their eyes off the ball. With hotels receiving an average of 58 online reviews per month, they are still a powerful tool in understanding guest satisfaction and driving new bookings, argues Revinate. Perhaps more than ever, operators need help in understanding how guest feedback is changing and evolving.
54 | Technology Prospectus 2020
“There is both positive and negative feedback and the best solutions are able to extract those as
unique points and categorise them appropriately” Adam Dorfman,
Reputation.com
MASS APPEAL Adam Dorfman, director of product manage- ment,
Reputation.com, underlines the one key trend of which all hospitality owners should be aware: “First and foremost, Google has become the primary place customers go to for information about your business. Indeed, we have some clients that see 10 times the engage- ment on their Google My Business profiles than they receive on their websites.” The most crucial feature of reputation man- agement software is the ability to aggregate all feedback and allow users to reply to reviews directly from the same platform. This capa- bility is driven by application programming interfaces (APIs) so the service you choose must include direct response APIs for Google and
Booking.com at the very least. “Before working with Travel Appeal, check-
ing each review channel and social network was time-consuming and cumbersome,” recalls Anna Fenten, head of brand, communications
and marketing at Searcys. “Now we can respond to reviews directly from the Travel Appeal platform, saving time and increasing accuracy.” “Our goal has always been to help busi- nesses make sense of the overwhelming amount of online data – including customer reviews, social posts, videos, photos and feed- back,” says Leonardo Piras, chief market- ing officer, Travel Appeal. For destination and tourist attractions, the company also provides predictive analysis of tourist arrivals and behaviour. Covering all the bases, however, still usu- ally requires manual human intervention. For example, just running a search of the name of your property may not be enough; it would be wise to run searches of the hashtags of conferences and events taking place in your hotel too, and these will change frequently. Most software solutions are sold as an annual contract costing £40-£60 per prop- erty per month. Implementation times vary
www.thecaterer.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60
