Hotels that listen - is it really 4%?
Millions of us have posted a review of a hotel we’ve stayed at. Whether it’s a good or a bad experience, most of us find that the opportunity to post our comments for all to see on TripAdvisor is far more appealing than the alternative of filling in a hotel questionnaire at the end of our stay and handing it in to reception, only to have no idea of how it is received.We become champions of the places we love and we get to highlight the problems with the places we loathe, whatever our motivation for sharing our opinions with the world.
For hotels, this represents both a huge potential headache and a great opportunity. This article in USA Today illustrates how hotel managers are starting to monitor online criticisms. But how many hotel managers really get it? Access to customer opinion on this scale is something that was never available before. How would hotels accurately and consistently get the views of their customers beforehand? Was it any more reliable than this quick and dirty method, warts and all?
Most hotels still adopt a reactive approach to problems. If enough people complain about the state of the towels, they know they have to replace them. If enough guests are unhappy with the quality of the breakfast, something will be done. It is rather like the ‘Tombstone Principle’ in aviation (where major safety changes are often made to aircraft designs only after one or more fatal crashes have deemed them unavoidable).
But this is missing the point. When a complaint is made about a property online, it is a great opportunity. An opportunity for the management to address an issue that has affected an individual guest’s experience; an opportunity to know what issues are coming up regularly and to be in a position to respond; and importantly an opportunity to show to the world that they care. Review sites give a hotel the opportunity to display their customer care skills publicly; they can be seen to listen to their customers, to engage in dialogue with them and to demonstrate how they resolve their customers’ issues. And all this on a site that very likely gets far more visitors in a week than their own site receives in a year!
So why do so few hotels get it? According to the article only 4% of negative reviews get a response. 4%! That means 96% either don’t know about the negative posts, don’t feel confident in responding to the reviewer or hope that the bad review just goes away. I stayed in many places on our SE Asia trip in December, and I added reviews for many of them. Two of my reviews included mentions of problems we had experienced. One hotel manager replied within 24 hours with an apology and an explanation, the other was silent. Guess which one made me feel like they cared? And which one is more likely to get my recommendation when others visit that part of the world?
At a time when every business seems to be trying hard to gather customer feedback, the hotel industry has got a third party that is actively doing its job for them. Yes there are fake reviews, but there is a pattern of truth to be found in the mass of content that is hard to ignore. I’ve met property owners who despise the user review phenomenon, and I find it hard to share their concerns. It’s a free source of customer opinion, and a massive platform on which to demonstrate your service quality to millions of potential customers. How long before the rest of the industry wake up and join the 4% who have already embraced this new world?
Andy,
There clearly remains a digital divide here. On one side of the rubicon you have the web savvy traveller bouncing between Wi-Fi hotspots, on the other the B&B /hotel owner and their dusty comments book.
The difficulty is both in accepting criticism and the format in which it comes. If you are turning on to the internet for the first time, it could be upsetting to see a warts ‘n’ all critique of your family-run retirement dream. Or inspiring.
One criticism landed at internet rating sites is how they reflect only the opinion of a minority. I would like to see how many people actually use them, of all the hotel visitors. If you are a digital sceptic, it could be easy to blame the vocal minority for views, which you feel are unrepresentative.
The internet is our feedback, is our voice. The best hotels already monitor complaints closely and cut the wheat from the digital chaff. As Andy makes clear, it’s time for the rest of the industry to take stock, and stock up on clean towels.
Mp
Thanks Mark,
You’re right it must be daunting for a small biz owner to suddenly find all sorts of things written about them. But then again, if people are writing them they would have been telling all their friends and family about those things in any case, and you wouldn’t have known. At least this way you can act.
The vocal minority view is one I have heard from hotel clients in the past. Even if they are minority, their influence is what you as a business owner need to be concerned about. If three people create a perception that your rooms are dirty and that your mattresses are riddled with bedbugs, that’s still a huge issue, and ignoring it or blaming it on those three complainers will not help you. Perception does become reality and has to be managed as such.
Let’s hear it for the clean towels!
Yep. I couldn’t agree more. The problem, at its root, is that customer service is a lost art, if not a dead one. With the economy the way it is, the travel industry is learning this lesson the hard way. I vote with my feet, Those who don’t care about my opinion don’t get my business.