Hotels are a highly customer service oriented industry and hence hotel reputation management is of critical importance for business growth.
Hotels have hundreds of rooms and they have to be fully occupied for revenue maximization. This obviously means several hundreds of people use hotel rooms and not all of them will be fully satisfied. There will invariably be some disgruntled visitors and they will express their resentment by writing negative reviews on the internet.
Hotels are an extremely competitive industry and the moment people see a bad review about your hotel they will turn to your competitor. Every unoccupied room is revenue loss and shrinkage of profit to the hotel.
Yet another major problem hotels will have to contend with is visitors are specifically asked by sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp to record their comments about how much they enjoyed their stay at a particular hotel and the inconveniences they suffered.
While these reviews may be of help to prospective clients, it creates for the hotels several problems. The hotels have no control over these reviews nor can they verify the authenticity of these reviews. This apart, many of these review sites give greater prominence to adverse comments than to positive reviews.
The onus is on you to prevail upon your satisfied clients to write positive reviews about you on other sites. The positive reviews must be overwhelming so that the few negative reviews get sidelined.
You next task is to ensure you have an impactful social media presence. Remember it only takes a few minutes to create n attention-grabbing social profile. It would suffice if you focus on a few major social media sites.
It is common knowledge that the Internet is now all about social media and you should totally exploit the social media to promote your business. Learn to be active and engage frequently with your audience by providing informative and thought-provoking content.
Participating in the social media is far more cost-effective and result-oriented than making phone calls or sending written letters. Prospective customers now predominantly rely on the internet for searching for hotel particulars.
Learn the art of dealing with negative feedback. Never retaliate but politely find out from the disgruntled customer the cause for his/her annoyance and if need be apologize and assure better services in future.