Amin Deroui - Ways To Capitalize on Hotel Online Reputation Management Strategy

Hotel online reputation management renders a variety of compensations to hoteliers. For an owner, it is crucial to understand the pulse of customers, by relating to their positive and negative experiences. Amin Deroui says this enables a hotel to directly correlate to the willingness of a customer to accept the brand. Reputation management lets customers understand the importance of brand loyalty as well as allows them to take a call on the reputability of a brand.

Online reputation management tools help a hotelier tap potential guests and target markets. Before learning how to do online reputation management, effective implementation can be ensured through a successful ORM strategy. To do so, a hotel must put the following action points in place.

1. Send out prompt responses

Online reviews from a guest is no different from guest stepping to the front desk with a complaint. These feedbacks need to be addressed with due care and service-orientation. A hotel that is a good listener and guarantees immediate rectification, retains the guest, because a customer noticing quick, effective responses online, return to the property again.

2. Magic of a personal touch

The volume of guest reviews online is overwhelming for a first time hotel operators. But a response with a personal touch are a mark of genuineness and honesty. These also get noticed by guests and potential customers. Such a tactful marketing communication always yields better results as compared to canned responses. Thus, a relationship is built with a potential guest at a crucial stage of consumer discovery.

3. Respond to both positive and negative reviews

This means, the hotel has to put itself in the shoes of its guests to gauge their sentiments correctly. A hotelier has to take time to understand the experiences of the consumer, as well as communicate that their response was received. Hotels can also ensure that they will be sharing the feedback with respective departments for corrective measures to be put in place ASAP.

4. Make it part of the culture

Amin Deroui says Reputation management should be a crucial part of the hotel's operating culture. These reviews render a treasure of consumer behavior data, that can be applied to integrated marketing applications will. That way, the hotel gets to focus on multiple operating teams on the basis of online guest experiences. This lets them drive confident marketing decisions.

5. Be accountable

Hotels need to recognize their standing among both past and future guests. In the end, everything trickles down to accountability. The operator has to take responsibility for all the feedback written online irrespective of the fact whether it is good, bad or indifferent. They cannot just simply deflect or complain for responsibility has to be taken for the given situation. Besides, active solutions need to be provided with a guarantee that it will not get repeated in the future.

Now we know that hotel online reputation mainly deals with the management of guest reviews. It is true that a busy hotel operator cannot possibly respond to each and every guest reviews with promptness, across multiple social media websites. This time consuming task can be tactfully dealt through automation. Thus, the importance of online reputation management services cannot be overlooked. Hence, hotel online reputation management suite can help hoteliers earn goodwill from existing customers in the long run and tap new markets as well.