Whether we love it or not, feedback is a critical part of a guest’s journey through your hotel.
NB: This is an article from Travel Media Group
Their responses inform how you can market your hotel to future guests, and more importantly, they share how your guests felt about your amenities, location, and rooms.
There are multiple ways to collect this information; through official survey responses, online reviews, and even messaging on social media. Each of these pieces of the guest feedback puzzle offers a different benefit to you as a hotelier, though they may not all be perfect for your unique needs. Understanding the perks of each guest feedback tool will help you make an informed decision on which is right for your hotel.
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Guest Surveys
One guest feedback tool is a guest survey. Sent directly to the email of a guest who visited your property, surveys offer a brief overview of a guest’s impression of your hotel. Surveys are customizable, so you can ask for opinions about any number of elements related to your hotel: most common are the location, available amenities, or whether guests would recommend your property.
Guest surveys are efficient and effective, though they rely on ensuring you’re able to send the emails out to your guests. Additionally, whether guests fill out your survey does partly depend on using smart email marketing and survey creation strategies. Travel Media Group’s Reputation Management solution helps hoteliers streamline the guest survey process. We help you gather the email addresses of guests who have stayed with your hotel and help schedule survey emails to be sent to inboxes.
Online Review Response
The most popular guest feedback tool is by far online reviews. With public access and numerous sites to choose from, collecting reviews from your guests is one of the easiest ways to gather a lot of sentiment at once. The responses may be more candid – but the risk is that online review responses are public-facing, so if a review is negative, it can greatly affect how potential guests view your property.
Review responses put you back in control of the online review narrative, and they are a hotelier’s most excellent tool to smooth over miscommunications that guests experience if they’re mentioned. Even if you receive nothing but positive feedback, responses help guests feel heard. Plus, you can take positive feedback as an opportunity to respond with additional information that the guest may not have mentioned but might be useful for future guests to know.
Social Media Responses
A far more candid guest feedback tool is social media, and it is also more immediate than the other feedback tools at your disposal. Communicating with guests online can help you gather insights from guests who haven’t visited. If they send you questions via direct message, you’ll get insight into what information guests need. You can use this information to create future posts on your profile while also responding swiftly to travelers as they ask questions.
Feedback through social media can come from guests who have visited your hotel, or from guests who have yet to have their first visit to your property. Either source can be turned into a learning opportunity or a conversation starter for your hotel. However, it’s equally important to note that feedback from social media might not mention your property’s profile directly. In this situation, social listening becomes crucial to your ability to get and respond to this feedback.
Travel Media Group’s OneView® platform collects all your social media mentions and organizes them onto one intuitive dashboard so you’ll never miss notifications when you want to make the most of this guest feedback strategy.
Having reviewed the different guest feedback tools, which one is truly the right one for your hotel?
Our Answer? All of Them.
In order to ensure you get the widest spread of guest feedback for your hotel, it would be best to make the most of each of these tools. The goal of guest feedback is to understand how you can refine your guest experience and understand the needs of future travelers hoping to visit your property.
However, it can be difficult to balance review response, social media mentions, and guest survey analytics on top of your day-to-day operations. That’s why, when we say to use every tool at your disposal, we don’t say it with the expectation that you’ll be doing it alone.
