During an era in the hotel industry of extreme growth and all-time highs for online reviews, customer expectations, and brand standards; how do hoteliers effectively manage costs around review response?
NB: This is an article from Travel Media Group
With something subjective like review response, the formula for cost is much more complicated than most hotel expenses and can sometimes elude even the most experienced hoteliers. The complicated nature of this cost formula is derived from the fact that there are both costs associated when you are responding to reviews, but also when you are not responding to your reviews.
Let’s examine these costs to help facilitate a strategy to ensure that your review response is efficiently managed and prevents raising your time, emotional and monetary costs to unsustainable levels.
Costs of Responding to Reviews
Monetary Costs
The first and most obvious cost is money. If you are currently responding to reviews those responses are most likely coming from one of two sources: On-Site Staff or a 3rd-Party Service. Both incur different costs to the hotelier.
On-site staff: On-site staff are salaried employees and their costs fall under wages. If you are considering hiring an employee, either part time or full time, strictly for review response, consider that, according to our data, it would cost the average hotel $30K/year.
3rd-Party Services: 3rd-Party services can be effective but also come at a monetary price for the hotel. When hiring a 3rd-Party service for review response keep these best practices in mind:
- Be sure that there is an approval process in place before the review response is posted online. Some review sites do not let you edit your response once posted.
- Ask the process of how the responses are written. Some companies utilize templates instead of real-life writers which can look very repetitive and obvious to travelers. Other companies outsource their writers outside of the U.S. causing grammatical and linguistic errors in their review responses.
Time Costs
Time Costs are a vital component of review response because the hotel industry is a 24/7, 365-day job. Reviews can be posted at a moments notice and it’s the travelers and brand expectations that they are responded to in a timely manner. According to our data, it costs hoteliers approximately 24 hours/month per every 100 reviews. That is a lot of time in a hoteliers world, who is constantly juggling multiple operational responsibilities. Logistically, this also makes it very difficult to hire someone full time or part time for the sole purpose of responding to reviews. The other thing to consider when analyzing time cost associated with review response is training. Training an employee at your property can be both extremely time-consuming and meticulous. These responses are the voice of your business and give travelers the first impression of your customer service. In an industry notorious for high turnover and in a time of record unemployment, hoteliers could find themselves taking a large amount of their time and effort training multiple employees over the course of a single year.
Emotional Costs
Emotional costs and the toll that review response can take on hoteliers are often overlooked when calculating the cost of responding to online reviews. It is difficult to keep your emotions in check when a review comes off as personal or derogatory towards you or your staff. Yet, as hospitality professionals it is our job to approach rude, demanding reviews with professionalism and outstanding customer service. However, after a long shift at the hotel, reading and responding to a number of these type of reviews can have real emotional costs, lowering your productivity, attitude, and energy level.
Costs of NOT Responding to Reviews
If your property is not responding to reviews then you are potentially saving some monetary, time, and emotional costs, but at what expense? Not responding could be costing your business far more and may be detrimental to the future of your hotel’s business.
Monetary Costs
- Franchise Fines: We are at a time where brand standards have never been stricter. Brands call for hoteliers to have professional, creative responses to guest reviews in a very short time frame. If that standard is not met, brands are implementing fines and fees for those hotels that are not in compliance.
- Future Business: Customers demand not only their reviews to be responded to but the reviews of others as well. In fact, 78% of travelers say managers who respond to both good and bad reviews care more about their guests. We will continue to see that percentage grow as traveler’s expectations continue to rise. Responding to reviews is no longer an added value, it is a requirement for hotels and will cost you future business if not properly addressed.
Business Insights
If you are not responding to reviews then you are not fully utilizing what your customers are telling you about your business to your advantage. Although some hoteliers see reviews and customer feedback in a negative light, travelers are essentially leaving hoteliers blueprints and clues for sustained business growth. They are sharing daily what is keeping your hotel in business and what is costing your hotel future business. These insights are valuable when determining where to invest future capital and can expose areas of your hotel that need attention.
You can also utilize reviews to determine where to invest your time. Customer sentiment concerning cleanliness can signal to a GM or owner that your housekeeping department could be costing the hotel business and would require training to remedy the problem. The same correlation is true concerning customer service and your front desk staff. By collecting this data, you can implement improvements at the property to increase your reputation over time.
A Cost-Effective Review Response Solution
At Travel Media Group we ally with our hotel partners to assure that no matter what type of cost, review response is responsibly managed:
- Monetary Costs: Travel Media Group provides plans that are completely customizable and can be based on either star rating or review site to safeguard our hoteliers from not meeting any brand standards and protecting them from franchise fines in the future. All at a scalable and cost-efficient amount.
- Time Costs: Our response specialists have 100% written responses ready for your approval within 24 hours, again to stay in compliance with the brand and give precious time back to our hoteliers that can be better utilized in other aspects of their business. To save even more time, you can enable auto-approval for positive review responses.
- Emotional Costs: Travel Media Group eliminates the emotional toll that responding to reviews can take on a hotelier due the objectivity of our U.S. based, highly vetted writers.
- Business Insights: We provide advanced sentiment analytics and data to our partners so they can be confident in the time and capital investments they put into their properties.
