Case study: Georgian House and Travel Appeal
Georgian House is a 63-bedroom independent boutique hotel in Pimlico, London. The hotel has a 12-month contract with Travel Appeal (total cost £550) to manage its online reputation. Before adopting Travel
Appeal, the hotel used ReviewPro. The hotel attracts around 125 mentions a month across social media, OTAs and review sites. Using an algorithm, Travel Appeal collects all of the feedback in one place and creates a ‘sentiment analysis’ by picking out positive and negative keywords. The score allows the hotel to benchmark its performance by department. Sales and marketing
executive Ellie Steele says it’s great to have all feedback collected in one place, although it hasn’t been entirely glitch-free: “We asked Travel
www.thecaterer.com
Appeal to remove the social media mentions from the sentiment analysis because we talk about ourselves positively on social media. The algorithm is learning, but you do have to put in the time.” The team goes through
reviews in each morning meeting. “We reply manually, which is time-consuming but we feel it is important to make that effort,” says Steele. “Facebook does recommendations now, so I make sure we are sharing the positive recommendations and replying there too.” The responsibility of writing replies is shared between Steele, reception staff and the front-of-house manager. Steele adds: “For social media I run our own searches too, because sometimes guests will use a hashtag or they won’t tag us. Sometimes they put
an Instagram story location sticker so you can search by location, which I do a few times a week to make sure I’m not missing any content.” Verbal feedback from guests during their stay is entered into a shared document. Steele says it was a challenge to link this feedback to the PMS and update guest profiles. Upon checking out, Georgian House uses another software provider, Review Filter, to send an automated email or SMS from the hotel manager asking them about their stay. “Some of the technology needs to catch up,” concludes Steele. “We are always on the lookout for more sophisticated software to help us manage our guest insights, particularly now with the new property [the Oak Bank hotel in Grasmere] to consider.”
from two weeks to a few months. For large multi-site operations (see the case studies for Mitchells & Butlers and
Reputation.com), it is important that the software is scalable and enables senior managers and directors to view reports for each site as well as an overview of total performance.
If your business has more than 20 sites,
here are some features to consider: ● Aggregate reporting and unique access to users that oversee regions, or a sub-group of locations.
● The ability to quickly identify under- and over-performers and what they are doing better or worse than other locations.
● The ability to hook into your CRM or PoS systems to automate review requesting.
Reputation management software does not require integration with your PMS, CRM or CRS to get it up and running, says Revinate, although if integration is desired to guaran- tee seamless connections with your guest data, then setting up will take longer than the mini- mum two weeks.
THE NITTY GRITTY With semantic analysis and multi-language opinion-mining, hospitality operators can see which issues are most important to their guests and which affect their online ratings.
Technology Prospectus 2020 | 55
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