The number one priority in hospitality is providing great experiences for guests. We want them to keep coming back.
Now that guests can write reviews directly from their mobile devices, online reviews about your property appear instantly.
What if those reviews were negative ones?
And what if you could prevent those negative reviews with a text?
97.7% of travelers will read reviews about hotel accommodations, amenities, and previous guest experiences. Meanwhile, a TripAdvisor study reveals 83% of consumers reference those reviews to determine their final booking choice.
The bottom line is this. If you’re trying to help your guests make better choices like booking (or re-booking) a visit to your property, address concerns as they happen!
With the right tech solution, you can do that.
What You Will See Here
- How Texts and Negative Reviews Relate
- A Text Situation
- The Power of Reviews
- Being Proactive About Reviews
How Texts and Negative Reviews Relate
- Texting services that integrate with cloud-based hotel property management solutions create AI-powered, instant responses that magnify positive guest experiences. These guest engagement tools can even initiate alerts for housekeeping services, without interrupting a busy and short-staffed front desk.
- In-house dining may be on the rise, but many guests prefer or have grown accustomed to, contactless ordering. When your restaurant is in the weeds, texting simplifies the experience by sending your guests’ orders directly to the kitchen. This increases accuracy and speed while reducing the margin of error that spurs negative feedback.
- Top-tier amenities draw a crowd. If a guest can book a visit to your spa through a digital concierge, not only does it free up front desk staff, but it places booking of premium amenities in the palm of your guests’ hands. It also avoids appointment scheduling hassles and administrative headaches that lead to negative reviews.
- Many guests travel with tight itineraries. Reminders of upcoming events, appointments, reservations, and excursions through a digital concierge is a seamless service to guarantee a positive guest experience.
A Text Situation
Contactless check-In
With Revinate Ivy, guests have the opportunity to check-in from their mobile device, before they arrive. If this guest had tried to check-in using Ivy, they would have received a text that their room was not ready. They could go about their travel day and not rush to wait at the hotel.
Pre-arrival updates
A digital concierge can also text pre-arrival updates regarding room status. If the hotel was running behind schedule to prepare and clean the room, the guest would have been notified.
Invitation to upgrade
Maybe this guest was already thinking about upgrading before they found out their room wasn’t yet ready? Ivy automatically sends texts with opportunities to upgrade their hotel rooms. If this guest had been given the option (before they found out that their room had been ready), we could have possibly avoided this situation entirely! With an additional upsell benefit.
Alerts for room Readiness
With Ivy guests receive constant updates from the time they book, through check-out. As a result, issues are communicated to the guest as they arise. In other words, this guest would have known about this problem sooner, rather than waiting until they arrived at the hotel to find out!
The Power of Reviews
Utilizing texts to get ahead of negative reviews is ideal. There is still a priority though to address guest feedback that wasn’t prevented with a text.
When a guest leaves an online review, positive or negative, responding not only shows you care, it creates connection. It’s the first step on your property’s journey to cultivate meaningful guest relationships, while driving more revenue.
- A 2016 study finds that hotels that respond to reviews see a 12% increase in review volume.
- According to a 2018 Harvard Business Review study, when hotels start responding to reviews, their ratings increase, on average, by 0.12 stars.
- While TripAdvisor’s Popularity Ranking factors quantity and quality of reviews, recency is the third driver. Responding to reviews creates an interactive environment, a place where guests feel seen, which encourages new reviews and in turn improves a hotel’s overall ranking.
Being Proactive About Reviews
If you can see feedback as a generous opportunity to consider what you may be missing, you’ll find it improves your business. Artificial Intelligence just made this even more accessible.
The ability to automatically receive and respond to guest feedback in real-time helps you get ahead of negative reviews because you’re addressing circumstances as they happen. The alternative is being unaware of a guest’s sentiments, and unable to clear the air before check-out. Answering common guest questions and concerns frees up staff to focus on face-to-face personalized service, while ensuring healthy feedback.
Negative reviews can move fast thanks to today’s tech. A digital concierge, AI-powered automation, and the right hotel CRM can empower your property to create the motivation to rebook.
About Revinate
Revinate takes hoteliers to new heights of performance through data-driven solutions that cultivate deeper relationships with guests. As the global leader in CDP-driven direct booking platforms, Revinate provides intelligent guest data management, omni-channel guest lifecycle communications, feedback, and commerce solutions for tens of thousands of the world’s leading hotels. Revinate’s software as a service (SaaS) solution is purpose-built for hoteliers with a focus on actionable data, intuitive UI, industry-specific applications, and measurable direct revenue results. For those reasons, Revinate’s solution has been chosen by hoteliers as the Top Rated CRM/Marketing Product in Hotel Tech Report in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022. For more information, visit www.revinate.com.
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