How can Hotels Best Manage Reputation and Net Promoter Scores?

“When I was VP of a hotel collection, I made it my mission to focus on the guest experience so that we could have more guest loyalty, offer a higher perceived value, have higher occupancy, ADR, and profitability. We followed our GRI- Guest Review Index on ReviewPro who recognized us as having a GRI of 96.1(%), the highest of any luxury hotel brand in the industry. We also had the #1 hotel in World and the #1, #2, #3, and #4 ranked hotels in NYC, so I am writing a book on the subject, but here, in a nutshell, is the method in principle, which will work for anyone ready to commit to the effort! It took me 20 years to learn to get this far and I am still learning with input from my associates and inspiring fellow hospitality stars.

MISSION IS QUEEN:
As a team, imagine the kind of reviews you want to receive and be the hotel team that inspires those kinds of reviews! Be true to the mission and let it guide all your actions and decisions.

SHARE:
Share an inspiring vision of hospitality with your team. Every traveller wants and deserves to be treated like a VIP when they travel. You don’t need to throw a parade for them, just sparkle a little sunshine on them to lift them up and make them feel welcome.
Make every guest feel CARE: Cared for, Appreciated, and Respected at Every encounter.

INVITE and INCLUDE:
Ask your team to join you on a mission of caring, collaboration, and continuous improvement. Strive to hire people whose eyes light up at the mission, vision, and values of the company. Then, keep talking about the mission and how to apply it to their everyday actions during the daily huddles. Inspire them, tell stories of great hospitality and empower them with freedom from fear to do what they feel is right for guests, within reasonable parameters. Ask them every day to let you know what support they need from you to be more successful at making guests happy.

EMBRACE FEEDBACK:
Owners, GMs, DOSMs, and all department leaders – It is time to face the truth about your experience and read your reviews every day. Not some end-of-the-month semantic analysis. For success, you need to feel the pain in your guests’ and employees’ voices to put your heart fully in the game, and you need to look at the complaints with equanimity in context to be able to serenely ask the right questions when looking for root causes and opportunities to modify/ iterate your communications, processes, mindsets, systems, and products. Remember it is never the employees’ fault. It was our job to give them the tools, skills, training, and inspiration to do the right thing, and we hired them, so don’t blame the staff or make them feel fear. That’s counterproductive. Just work together with them to find better options to try next time.

COLLABORATE:
Find ways to double up on what people love, and make sure every guest has a VIP experience. You won’t get 5-Star reviews from “transactional” treatment that is merely “Polite and Professional”. People want to be wowed! “Wow” experiences come from generosity. “Sparkle sunshine” on the guest at every touchpoint. Keeping the Mission, vision, and values in mind, keep micro-innovating (tweaking) the guest journey every day.

FIX IT:
Collaborate with your team to find the root causes of issues when they come up in reviews and find ways to innovate the guest experience to eliminate or at least reduce the friction point. What kills the joy of your guests is also killing the energy of your team. If you want to keep your guests and employees loyal, don’t just focus on the person in front of you. Leaders work with their teams to plan how to eliminate or diminish the friction point for every guest in the future.

TRACK IT:
Mixed reviews are an obstacle to revenue optimization, so follow your NPS, guest review ratings, and rankings on Tripadvisor right along with your financial KPIs on your for your monthly P&L meetings. Your scores are a reflection of your operational effectiveness, your culture, and they are a leading indicator of future financial success.

CELEBRATE:
Share your 5-star reviews everywhere your staff can see them! Include your Tripadvisor rankings on your nightly reports and celebrate with your team every step along the journey to your goal of 100% guest satisfaction. No, you’ll never have perfect scores, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun trying! You’ll never know how far your team can go until you reach for the STARS!”

“Reviews are essential to hotels. You want the majority to be positive and glowing however sometimes the way you respond to a negative review can be just as powerful.

As a best practice, make sure you respond to every single review in a timely manner. Responses should be genuine and not too much of a cookie-cutter response. If you do get any negativity then take a practical approach and leave any emotion out of the response. Incentivising staff to encourage guests to leave reviews is a great way to boost the number of reviews you get and also having systems in place that easily manage all review platforms is also good best practice.

Guests still look up a hotel’s reputation and what people are saying about them on social media as well as TripAdvisor before committing to their booking so it needs to be at the forefront of your marketing and operational teams’ minds.”

“When working with a hotel to improve their review scores, I always start with education. Staff and owners need to understand that small improvements in average score lead to bigger increases in ADR.

Staff need to be educated on the cause and effect of what they do on a daily basis, how it affects customer sentiment and hence income. Income affects the number of staff that can be employed and the budget for hotel improvements. Reviews need to be shared with the whole team. Brainstorming sessions need to happen around how we can improve service and deliver more. Nothing will change unless the team take ownership of their role in improving scores.

Other tricks that work:

1. Incentives for improved review scores
2. KPIs for department managers
3. Rotating who replies to reviews
4. Sharing good reviews at team meetings
5. Sharing with staff that there is a plan in place to action negative reviews
6. Carrying through on said action plan

If staff can see change happening, they will become invested in delivering improved service.”

1. “Manage expectations of your service levels in advance. Make sure you know their expectations and explain to your guests what they can, but more importantly what they can NOT, expect! Be upfront.
2. Underpromise and overdeliver
3. Have clear goals (including an action plan) and a SLA
4. Create ways of working to deliver consistent service and quality
5. Train and develop your staff and empower / inspire them to make it happen
6. ANSWER YOUR REVIEWS in a genuine and resourceful way (or hire an expert to do it for you and turn your reviews into revenue!)
7. Celebrate successes”

“Being in touch with your guests and encouraging them to leave a review is the most common way. Another way is to take a recommendation from a guest while they’re staying. Many hotels have dedicated apps that guests should use during their stay. These Apps are tracking the activities and facilities used, and can grab a review along the stay. At the end of the stay, the App can send a message to the guests, summarising their global experience and offering them to just confirm.

In the vacation rental industry, the reviews of the guests are linked to the platform where the booking was made. In many of them, reviews go to the Host, and rating the property under their management. This highlight creates a situation where hosts are fighting for their good reputation and taking reviews very seriously, by trying to prevent any bad review as soon as any problem arises. This link between hosts and properties should be considered in the Hotel space to create a larger circle of reputation, involving staff and management. A great review benefits all.”

“In a time when Airbnb business is still a heavy driver, the way of doing business in hotels could be aligned to the Airbnb model. Airbnb typically want a response within 2 – 3 hours, whereas it is known that the hotel decision-makers are still traditionally respondent on a Monday – Friday basis. I feel that both enquiries and reviews must be responded to in a real-time environment within 3 hours. This maintains a healthy response rate which is a key score indicator. If a review is not responded to in a timely fashion it indicates that the hotel can not run on in a 24/7 environment which is becoming a requirement.”

“Technology and be where your guests are! Knowing and using the same channels that your guests use can always help improve the guest experience and puts you in a position to proactively address service issues. Implementing technology like chatbots and social media monitoring can allow your hotel to communicate with your guests in the way they want to communicate, reducing opportunities for negative reviews. Internally, technology adaption can also improve workflows when dealing with a guest issue.

Gone are the days that the guest comes down to the front desk to log a complaint (say an HVAC issue). The desk agent logs the complaint and room number in the big red book behind the desk and proceeds to radio engineering via walkie talkie. Then (and this is a maybe) engineering will complete the necessary repairs, radio back to the desk that the task has been completed, the desk agent logs the repair in the big red book and communicates with the guest that the repair has been made. As the saying goes… “there’s an app for that!””

“For most people, the NPS starts at the hotel during the check-in process. In a fast-growing digital economy, I would beg to differ that it starts directly online. In my view, the experience of a guest starts at the moment of researching a suitable location. Then, once your location is discovered, the experience of booking, through to customer service and all the way to staying and leaving your premises are all part of the experience a guest has with you.

Therefore, the NSP in an age where we are limited in contact with other humans, the total experience has to be considered as part of the NPS. On average, the hotel industry has a total NPS of 53. You might be higher or lower. No matter the score, it is an opportunity to improve your experience. One thing all hoteliers and accommodation providers can do is to communicate with guests more often. Don’t shy away from a bad review or a low NSP. Tackle it head-on and seek to understand why and respond to each one. Those that will give you a lower score can become your greatest promoters if you reach out and do your best to mend the issue. You and your team have the power to turn things around.

In terms of practicality, you can have a simple floating review plugin on each web page, booking engine and check-out to understand the guest experience online. On the ground, invest in understanding the guest experience at each point of guest interaction, you can have a QR code opt-in to provide feedback with a reward (where applicable) for simply giving you feedback. You will find that there are 3 categories of people. Promoters, detractors, and the passive. Seek to understand and win over the detractors, nurture the promoters and encourage/win over the passive people. Use this feedback to build depth in your business and truly understand how your customers feel on-premise, off-premise and online.

Lastly, let’s not forget your team. Your team is your biggest asset. Seek to develop depth with your team and motivate them to produce better results. Celebrate the milestones together and reward excellence while encouraging improvement. Have systems in place that takes care of their well-being and gives them enjoyment from work. Why? Because happy workers produce the BEST work. And workers at their best keep customers happy. And happy customers won’t be able to shut up about how good you are!”

“The best way to manage your property’s online reputation and extract the greatest benefits from your property’s brand ambassadors and positive sentiment index is by subscribing to an Online Reputation Management (ORM) platform like Revinate, ReviewPro and TrustYou. The ORM technology allows you not only to monitor your reviews in a single dashboard and analyze patterns in causation for the bad reviews, but also to monitor the reviews for your comp set and use their weaknesses to improve your product and the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

These are all easy-to-implement tactics. But the greatest benefit of ORM technology is monitoring the trends in your property’s Sentiment Index, i.e., how the travelling public perceives your property. You can also use the ORM Sentiment data feed for your RMS and revenue management decisions. Naturally, the higher your property’s Sentiment Index, the higher the rates you can charge. Cornell University and ReviewPro discovered a direct correlation between the Sentiment Index and pricing and even came up with a concrete formula.”

“In the rapidly changing hospitality industry, it’s important to listen to feedback from today’s travelers and 96% of TripAdvisor users consider reviews important when planning trips and booking hotels.

At Vienna House Easy Airport Bucharest we are proud that we have increased our TripAdvisor score, even during the pandemic when we are working with reduced personnel and services. How we are doing this? We constantly ask for feedback and try to anticipate their needs. We try to solve any problems on the spot, so that the guest does not leave unhappy. We are a small team, but are working out of passion for this industry. If we look at the comments of the guests, we see that they most appreciate the hotel staff.”

“Bad reviews are generally coming from “snowball effect” circumstances when an issue has not been tackled promptly and/or effectively. When we are not attentive, intuitive or genuine, if we don’t create familiarity and recognition or we don’t see ourselves as psychologists more than mere “automated-service providers”, we won’t see anything but bad reviews. After all, I hope our industry will focus more on inspirational managers who are able to build trust in autonomous, committed, caring teams.

By experience, bad teams bring bad reviews while a good team can recover and prevent a bad review even before the guest checks out. Also, to the eyes of a complaining guest, a good team that tries to solve the problem beats a bad team that looks for someone to blame (or worse). CRMs and chatbots, (more than forms to fill, according to Salesforce’s study) are much more likely to help hoteliers to track, collect in-house feedback, recover right away and generate a bespoke in- and after-stay experience, so a better online reputation.”

“When the guest comes to a hotel they’re expecting a high level of service. However, they may be satisfied or disappointed. In the first case, when guests are satisfied, the guest experience is the result of the difference between expectation and reality and then the result is therefore superior to their expectations. This leads to the guest’s feeling of loyalty to the hotel and other establishments. In the second case, when guests are disappointed, it means that the hotel has acted wrongly towards the guest, so guest expectations have not been met and are disappointed by the service received.

How many times has a guest complained to the reception desk, but they have merely apologised without being able to take any action to resolve their dissatisfaction? What happens then is that the dissatisfied guest will leave and will no longer consider it meaningful to complain again. Their frustration will lead to word of mouth that will damage the image of the hotel, losing both the guest who has just left and the possible future guest who received the negative word of mouth and will write a bad review. In cases of dissatisfaction, the guest may resort to a complaint, which can often become an opportunity given to the establishment to rectify the situation and to offer a better service to the guest.

Always then look for feedback, at every point of contact you have with the guest. Do we meet them in the lift? Then ask them for feedback. Are they stopping by reception to ask for information? Then we try to get feedback on the stay.

To be able to get feedback during the stay and then before check out, we can use the following means:
– Social networks / Blogs / Forums / Online surveys / Questionnaires.
– There is a range of Review software to manage communication with guests.

It is also important to organise and keep reminders of follow-up calls to be made during the stay, or to send e-mails that make contact with guests in-house quickly and efficiently. Once you get feedback, not creating any interaction is like leaving your guest at the reception desk for hours and hours waiting for your response while you take care of something else. We cannot remain impassive to our guests’ perceived frustration. Instead, finding the most courteous way to seek a solution to a complaint creates interest and increases trust and confidence in your organisation, creating customer advocacy.

Welcome gifts, gadgets for guests, special thoughts during their stay in the hotel and goodbye gifts are valuable marketing weapons that improve brand reputation, gestures that make the stay experience more pleasant, bring a smile and leave a good memory.

Travelling with children requires more organisation, so we need to make our guests’ stay as comfortable as possible and create precious memories. Arrange special amenities for children (cots and beds, changing tables, bottle warmers, bathing accessories, high chairs and bathrobes), prepare special children’s menus or have a babysitting service available during the stay. If guests perceive special care for them and their family, they will be encouraged to write positive reviews and post content on social networks.

To maintain a high net promoter score, always follow the HEART method (Hearing, empathize, apologise, resolve, thank):
– Hear: Listen to the guest
– Empathy: Show empathy
– Apologize
– Resolve; desire to find a solution
– Thank: To give thanks”

“Prevent negative reviews at property by delivering what is promised during the booking process (and on paper) and better, promote positive reviews by over-delivering. On that, have a system to recognise issues at property, whilst the guests are still there so they can be rectified. This should lead to not being afraid of asking for reviews, which should be backed by a very simple process for past guests to leave a review. Following on and to close the cycle, respond to ALL reviews, positive or negative, so you can keep a narrative that has a level of control and pragmatism because not all guests’ feedback is reasonable.”

“First of all, it is obviously key for the full hotel team to engage with your guests and ensure you meet and exceed expectations. Ensuring your hotel descriptions, offers etc., are up to date everywhere and that your product lives up to how you’ve sold it.

All reviews need to be read, responded to professionally and actioned accordingly, showing potential future guests you care and that you’re building trust in the process.”

“It is important to respond to every review, whether they’re good or bad. Before the pandemic, some hotels had key members of staff that were responsible for the online reputation. I suggest that if hoteliers can not do this inhouse they need to outsource this.”

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