A Management Review Tool is an essential component of a Hotelier’s toolkit. With the evolution of online reviews, on-site plugins and social media, hoteliers have to constantly look at the big picture – who is talking about the brand? Where and what are they saying? From dedicated review sites to Meta Search platforms, the answer is multi-faceted and constantly changing.
Capture visitor sentiment accurately, with feature-rich review tools
Textual reviews have traditionally been the standard, coupled with ratings, recommendations, and other parameters. Now, with aggregators like TripAdvisor offering picture reviews or even video reviews from HolidayIQ, review management tools must transform and incorporate these modules.
The importance of quality reviews cannot be overstated. 53% users will not book a hotel unless it has sufficient reviews, TripAdvisor reports, and if hoteliers respond to 65% of them, a hotel’s rating rises to an average of 4 stars. An effective model for ensuring return customers, as well as informing and attracting new prospects, is by providing users myriad ways to evaluate their hospitality experience and share feedback.
This makes built-in picture reviews support and powerful response mechanisms, critical for modern hotel & hospitality ORM teams.
ORM’s role and picture reviews simply cannot be ignored
Typically, the ORM market impacts 80% of a hotel’s workforce and functionalities. Based on the brand’s repute, stakeholders would define marketing campaigns, allocate budgets, hire employees, expand presence, and so on. However, with new channels for reviewing and insights-dissemination emerging every day, hoteliers are faced with a complex task – how do we achieve an end-to-end view of customer chatter? And how do we respond effectively, across formats, platforms, languages, and locations?
Modern review management tools leverage state-of-the-art technology to address these requirements. Data from multiple sources are collated, passed through a semantic engine that ‘reads’ the entire review, analyzed according to KPIs like service or value-for-money, and finally, a response is elicited.
However, review management tools often don’t factor in the features available on the original review platform. Google Reviews, for instance, has supported images for a while now. Yet, the same content would appear without the embedded pictures when viewed from most review management solutions. Social sites like Instagram, Pinterest, and Foursquare have been popular sources for travel inspiration for a while now and require the utmost attention from hoteliers. However, marketing executives lack adequate visibility, and must constantly cross-check with the source-site to ensure their response is in alignment with the visitor’s original comment.
