Archive for the ‘Hotel Reputation’ Category

We have been approached by many tourism companies both agents and hotels alike requestiong help with negative comments appearing about them on the search results.  More often than n0t they come from sites like tripadvisor whose business model is based on customer feedback.

There are 2 big issues with this:

1. You tend to get more genuine feedback from customers who have had a negative experience rather than a positive one.
2. Competitors write negative things about another company which are false.

So quite often Tripadvisor will not give a overall balanced feedback from customers because the same old saying is true “a customer who has had a bad experience will tell a 100 people where a customer who has a good experience will tell 10″.  Customers will normally only give feedback to a site like Tripadvisor if they have had a negative experience rather than a positive one.

We are also now seeing what we believe to be competitors writing bogus negative feedback about competing companies in order to trash their reputation.  It’s very bad practice and something we frown on and will certainly not get involved in.

What can you do about negative comments on Tripadvisor?

1. Make sure there is genuinely not an issue that needs addressing if  many customers are complaining about the same thing.
2. Offer customers a gift if they write something positive about their stay at your hotel on Tripadvisor
3. Hire a company to help protect your reputation online and bury negative results in the search results.

The outcome, although you can’t get rid of negative comments totally is you can show a much more balanced view, in many ways this is much better than just positive or negative views.

What would you do if a customer was standing outside your business front door shouting negative things?

There are certain types of industries that seem more prone to getting negative comments and competitors playing dirty tricks and trying to trash their company’s reputation.  Here are some of the main industries our clients come from recently:

• Recruitment and HR
• Construction and building
• Celebrities
• Travel agents / hotels and other accommodation types
• Dating websites

I used to hear business owners talk about the Internet and not really understand it, back then companies just missed out on another great sales channel.  Today, however, I have to say when I hear a business owner having the same attitude I have to hold back from calling them crazy and telling them they will be out of business in 5 years.

Why do I feel so passionate about this, well in the past when you played ignorant to the Internet you were just loosing possible sales, but now people and competitors could be killing your business by trashing your reputation online.  Never has it been more important to take SEO and Online PR more serious, as a business owner you may not use the Internet much, but I am sure as hell your customers do.  You may not only be missing sales but loosing them when customers Google your company and see negative feedback and unhappy customer experiences.

If you had someone standing outside your business’s front door saying “your company was a scam, sold terrible products, had terrible customer services” then what would you do?  I am sure you would do something rather than ignore them, well the same thing could be happening online right now.

Every company now needs to take reputation management serious and not wait until negative comments and results appear on the first page of the search engines.  Businesses need a to have in place a proper procedure for complaints and feedback.  Monitoring or having a company like Reputation Management For defending your reputation online could prove invaluable.

Reputation management is here to stay as it will be an ongoing threat. The social media has made it easy for all to plug in and play. When user feeds in a negative comment it is more likely to generate new type of threat for your brand. Your infrastructure vendor will be good at blocking malware, but not the negative comment circulating on the web. So most companies will need to find way to shield their repute. We need not have to dig deep to take into consideration what the future holds, but we’ll see that in coming year companies will take a serious stand to monitor their reputation.

One of the main factors why I chose to pick on social networking sites is because they are a very important part of reputation management. If there is one thing that we learned from social media is that user content ranks very well in the search engines. Just sit back and do a search, I am sure you will come across at least a couple of social media sites in first page of your search. So imagine the height of damage these hi-speed information portals can do in a click of the mouse. The usage and access to social media in workplace will be on top priority to help protect companies from getting their brand tarnished.

If you notice many of these social websites allow users to register in company user ID and even generates URL that ends with the name of your company.

http://twitter.com/companyname

http://companyname.Wordpress.com

http://www.myspace.com/companyname

You need to be the first to register with your name and URLs on these sites and do it fast. The problem with such provision is that you are always at risk and someone use these sites to damage your brand reputation. It will be immature to say that such things will go off and settle down by itself. Companies should not take for granted the power of social websites and its impact. The one-click-connect-to-all kind of platform is powerful to damage your reputation and is an established form of media today. Remember when a user tweets about the pathetic service you offer, it will obviously put your business in trouble, that’s the power of social media

While you want to remove bad press or comments on social website, you need not have to change the way you do your business. Even if you run your business perfectly you are bound to get a dissatisfied customer who will do the rest to tamper your reputation. The best way to counter malicious content on the web is to hire a reputation management firm to take care of your stake. They will counter these allegations, build up your profiles and gets them listed on search engines with keywords that are important to your reputation. It’s one method to gain access and be in control. It also provides you with a chance to reach those customers who never visited your official company website.  Safeguarding your brand reputation comes with a cost and should be included in your business budget.

What’s else can motivate you to stay at home this Christmas?  With the fall of Flyglobespan, BA managing to stop a strike, Eurostar trains not working and the roads, well quite frankly a nightmare.  Why bother having all this stress and just enjoy what I hope is a White Christmas back in the UK.

It was crazy how Eurostar dealt with the crises of people being stuck on the train for 7 hours.  The first thing that sprung into my mind is what would happened if that was a fire?  Would you be stuck on the train in the middle of the tunnel for 7 hours with smoke building up.  I hope not.

What I don’t understand is why so many companies get it wrong when it comes to keeping its customers up to date. I hear time and time again that people are left standing in stations, airpots, etc and don’t have a clue what’s going on.  This can be just about the most damaging thing for a companies reputation, management should have responded to their customers immediately, even just to say, sorry we’re on it just not sure what the problem is.  If a negative situation happens, sometimes this can turn a potential nightmare into a dream situation if its dealt with correctly.

This is just another blow to tourism in general, with the recession, new flight taxes, companies failing and strikes imminent, you can understand why staycations have become so popular.  Unfortunately for Eurostar 1000’s of people are going to remember how they ruined their Christmas.  What should Eurostar do now to fix their reputation and win back customers?

Flyglobespan, British Airways, where does it stop, the tourist industry has been hammered with negative news and press.   On the BBC last night they were talking about the average staff’s wages, the average BA cabin crew gets almost double what they get at Virgin.  Either BA is paying way to much or Virgin is under paying either way there are no winners when figures like these are released.

The tourism industry as a whole is under attack with hotels reputation being tested with negative feedback on sites like Tripadvisor putting potential customers off.  This latest news about Flyglobespan certainly will not help the industry, who wants to go abroad and worry about not getting back.  The hotels miss out big time on all the destinations that Flyglobespan flew to.  The knock on effect is massive, restaurants, shops, taxi drivers, the list goes on.

The Internet can be very one sided, hotels, air carriers, tour operators by the very nature of what they do have tens of 1000’s of customers.  It is totally down to the laws of average that no matter what you do or how fantastic your customer service, you will have someone, somewhere not happy about the service.  Obviously having a bad customer service and ignoring issues can compound negative press online.  In the good old days word of mouth was normally the only place annoyed customers would vent their frustrations.  With the dawn of the Internet came along blogs, social network site, forums and other avenues for people to write about a bad experience they might have had with a hotel, restaurant etc.  Now the whole world can listen rather than just friends and family.

Customers who have had a very good experience do not often tell people about it unless asked, and they certainly don’t write about it, so because of this the Internet can become a company’s worst enemy rather than best friend.

Fixing this could be easier than you’d think, yes it does take time, resource and require systems in place, but done correctly it can not only help manage your reputation online but even attract more customers.  Having for example a facility to capture customer feedback and publish them to the web is a good example.

The big lesson with PR and reputation management is don’t leave it until it becomes a crisis and you are loosing business, make sure you are take a proactive approach and protect your businesses reputation.

Most businesses want their websites to show up on the first page of search engines. How good is it if your website  appears on the first page of Google or Yahoo? You search for your company/product name and to your surprise you find one or more listings on top. You have been waiting for this, but then the sudden change in weather on search engines is astonishing. Have a closer look, do you see anything unusual? Well it could be those negative comments about your products doing the rounds and inviting so many visitors and obviously putting your website on top. If it is so, you are in big trouble.

One negative comment is enough to frighten away many likely customers. How genuine these reviews or complaints are is not the question, but it is about the impact. Your company’s reputation is at stake besides loss of revenue in millions.

Reputation management has become a crucial tool, but then very few companies go for this service to counter negative propaganda waged against their firms. Airlines, banks, hotels are the most vulnerable and are always at the receiving end, by disgruntled customers or envying competitors. By being ignorant of reputation management these firms end up sorting issues through litigation, which is twice as expensive and time consuming as compared to hiring reputation managers.

In such situations, our suggestion is to ‘nip it in the bud’- suppress the negative comments and bring up the positive ones. It is all about customizing a strategy to corner negative comments and design a campaign to keep positive reviews of your company above others.

Safeguarding your business from on-line damages and ensuring its smooth run is tantamount to running a business itself. New and small companies need to understand how vulnerable they are and how important reputation management services are for their business.

The hospitality industry is yet to master the tricks to deal with reviews on social media. The user-generated reviews are exploding and consumers are gaining greater power to broadcast on communities like  Facebook, Twitter, TripAdvisor, Expedia, Yelp, or any group of the social networking forums. The pace of this change has certainly caught many hotels off guard. A recent survey conducted by the Market Metrix and Trip Advisor found that 85% of the hotels have no guidelines on how to handle the negative guest reviews.

The hotels have always worked hard to keep their guests happy, in part because of the fact of repeat business to maximise occupancy, they fail to realise that one unhappy customer can take a huge toll on their reputation. This could result in losing  five other likely guests. With the advent of the social media, the hotel management needs to keep track of a huge crowd viewing an online negative comment or review which may be untrue.

This puts us back to the square one and the question is how to deal with the negative comments.

The standard responses like repeatedly stating how you value their feedback, without properly addressing the specific comment does not do any good to change the negative review online. Instead you could even address it to  the concerned online forum or review site could be the answer.

The hotel management could perhaps follow the comments on TripAdvisor and can prove foul play in those cases which they think it is a fabricated story. Therefore, complaint recovery acts as one of the best ways to build customer loyalty and negate your negative reviews.

So, look out for your online reputation, negative or positive, private or public, its time to take a more active role in the online dialogues. Keep an eye on your business reputation before it gets too bad or out of your control. Never ignore the online reviews, because in a later period it might cost you dearly!

A recent survey of hotels across Europe by travel comparison engine suggests a correlation between high hotel prices and low reputation; cities where the average price for a standard double room is very high, appear at the bottom of the Reputation Ranking. Why?

It suggests that consumers are finding hotels are high priced, or put in marketing speak, the value proposition is wrong so that they are dissatisfied by the experience that they have paid for. Low priced hotels satisfy consumers, not because they are better, but because they seem worth the price.

All UK cities perform poorly with Edinburgh hotels at the top of the list at 29th and London near the bottom. UK hotel prices are uniformly high.

Hotel reputation management face a number of challenges:

• monitoring and responding to hotel review sites like Trivago and Tripadvisor
• working more closely with travel guide authors who are key in the decision process of travel planners
• creating change within the hotel to address failings that are being criticised.
• Working to improve the hotel’s internet position and prominence.

Many hotels are already struggling with SEO activity but the visibility of review sites when customers search for individual hotels means that reputation management has to encompass both traditional search engines like Google as well as Web 2.0 tools like hotel review sites.

At last google has talked about the importance of reputation management on their blog Google’s stance on negative results appearing in their search results has always been it’s not there responsibility to remove the site from their search results.  Their take on it is that the business or person effected needs to contact the website owner and ask them to remove it from their site.

“If you can’t get the content removed from the original site, you probably won’t be able to completely remove it from Google’s search results, either. Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business. If you can get stuff that you want people to see to outperform the stuff you don’t want them to see, you’ll be able to reduce the amount of harm that that negative or embarrassing content can do to your reputation.”

The biggest issue for reputation management is people not even knowing what to search for to get help.  I have asked many business owners / people if they have heard or know what reputation management is, and to date I have not had anyone heard of it.  It was the same with SEO 10 years ago, no one knew what search engine optimisation was or involved.  By google acknowledging this industry helps make people aware that there are companies like www.reputationmanagementfor.com who can help remove negative results in the search engines.

So lets continue to educate people and make them aware of the service reputation management companies can offer.  Businesses know they need it, you only need to see site like TripAdvisor, RipOffReport, Scam.com to name a few sites that can often appear right below a companies main website.  Up to 70% of people click on a negative search result if its directly below the company website.  How many times have you checked tripadvisor before you book a hotel room?

If you are a business and have negative reults damageing your online reputation then search google for Reputation Management to find a company who can help remove or bury the negative results.

What’s amazing is how big companies still have no real understanding of reputation management on-line and how it effects them.  Here are some examples.

KFC

The Google search shows kentuckyfriedcruelty.com these kinds of search results can effect not only business reputation with customers but also shareholders.

Apple’s Iphones

This result is number 4 in Google could certainly put people off buying the Iphones.  The issue with negative results showing for your product is you never know how much it’s hurting and costing the comapny.

negative content results about iphones

Holiday Inn New York

Many hotels around the world suffer from sites like tripadvisor which normally have way more negative comments than positive ones.

Holiday Inn Hotel Reputation Online

So these are just a few quick examples of household brands who have not fully understood the need for managing the content on the first page results of search engines.  It’s no easy task and requires commitment from the company as well as the online reputation company.  Some industries naturally have a tougher job than others, take hotels for example, because of the nature of the industry they encourage 3 rd party websites to have content on them so they can make commission of bookings.  These 3rd party sites learnt very early on that customer feedback creates lots of fresh original content.  The problem created by this approach of course is more often than not people will write remarks when they have had a bad experience rather than a good one, so more often than not the content is normally negative rather than positive.

So how do you protect your brand and company reputation?

There is no quick solution to this, it’s really about creating good quality content  and keeping on top of the social network sites.  When we are creating content we put it into categories:

1. Top quality – this content is written for the main website and any press releases.
2. Middle quality – this content maybe out sourced and used for social net work sites and micro sites.
3. Lesser quality – this is used to fill the Internet with positive stories and helps push and support the top quality content.

Although we offer SEO services much of our work is creating positive content for clients and managing the whole online presence.  It is an ongoing battle making sure you keep on top of the online world, 1 or 2 articles a week just won’t do it if you have a global brand and you are going against 1000’s of people writing about you.