Do all hotels need to give a thought about reputation management; is this a critical new function in the travel industry? The answer is ‘Yes’. In the era of volatile social networking,  how a potential customers’ buying decision is influenced by traveler’s reviews is an important factor to be considered. Well precisely; it’s about monitoring, examining and responding to reviews and opinions of your hotel and taking part in social media to mold the perceptions of your brand.

Hotel industry has realized the importance of online reputation management, but is not sure how to handle the complexities of online reviews and comments.  Hotels have been prompt to adopt social media, but I believe a lot of hoteliers are mixing up priorities.

ReputationManagementFor.com- suggests that Hotels need to have minimum Reputation Management and Social media understanding.  Why? This is because it is regarded as a marketing tool that almost touches every aspect of a hotel, from operations to revenue management.

Talking about social media, Facebook and Twitter can be competent channels to involve travelers to get them to speak, but the buying decisions are made on review sites. Hoteliers should know the difference that people go to Facebook to socialize and that TripAdvisor is not for shopping but it’s a review website. And the minimal hotels should do is to monitor and respond to online reviews.

It is also crucial to note that reputation management is not about attempting to eliminate negative content. It’s a fictitious statement. It’s about genuineness and transparency since your business deserves the best.

TripAdvisor was the first to introduce review sites for travelers, and today it has 50+ million opinions and reviews on its website. Taking into account the bulk of visitors TripAdvisor has and the amount of reviews posted directly, it is crucial hotels to monitor and react to such reviews and opinions.

We feel TripAdvisor is the most decisive factor of a hotel’s online reputation management program. If a hotel is inactive in social media circuit, it ought to be taking heed and responding to TripAdvisor reviews and use the feedback to improve their customers’ experience. As mentioned above customers have more than dozen options to air their views. Reputation Management becomes more complex with Social Media, because travelers post their views on social sites, review websites or other forums, and monitoring alone can be intense, before you decide what step is to be taken

Social media can be a massive waste of time if we don’t have a clear idea how to deal with it, and still if you clutch on to the orthodox marketing activities it will reflect on your revenue. The way travelers’ decision making and communication mode has transformed dramatically we need to have massive resources to arrest further damage. With the need to adjust to this situation, hotels must keep a tab on the latest happening and publish useful, pertinent content on review sites and social websites.

The news that Radisson hotels in Canada were hacked is no surprise. What is a surprise is that it does not happen more often with hotels employing low quality staff and the relaxed attitude we al have to giving hotels our details. It is an obvious site to hack. Fortunately for Radisson other hotel chains have experienced similar hacking; Westin hotels were hacked in 2008 in Berlin by a Russian mafia gang. For Wyndham Hotels, there is the embarrassment of being hacked three times by the same method before it was discovered. In all cases credit card information was compromised.
Hotel chains routinely hold customer credit card data to hold against a stay. Any criminal will know this and know that there are multiple logins and sites to access the systems. Similarly many hotels run the same systems so the problem is mo than one hotel chain wide.
What impact will a loyalty card have if customers are having to replace their cards? Fortunately hotels have the obvious recourse of inviting guests to stay for free as an apology which protects them from too much negative comment.
Hotels should respond to these sorts of incidents with rapid response free by offers to customers to keep them onside.

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.

Bogged down by the  bad press your hotel gets online? It sure is a challenge to stay abreast of all those nasty comments written about you. Prospective customers are heavily dependent on  online information as it is just a click away. And chances are they gulp down every inane written  online. A stray comment here and there can make or break business So the bad news is that negative publicity about your hotel can  make it online very easily and dampen your sales. And the good news is that we can help monitor and eliminate it.

Give your business a short in the arm with our  reputation management service. There is a steady flow of information on the web. Any lay man can create a blog and step into the shoes of a journalist and air his views. There are also a horde of travel websites and travel agencies that invite comments from customers. Where an even tempered customer may just  turn up his nose, a cranky customer may put up some ridiculous comments. When you are facing cut-throat competition, stepping up measures to curtail negative publicity will keep you in good stead.

The first step towards curbing negative publicity is knowing what is written about you, where it appears and when. We will set up a review tracking system and monitor all content written about you. We will also track information on your rival hotels and this will give you a better idea of the current scenario. We know that prevention is better than cure , so we use a proactive approach rather than a reactive one.