Review Management

What is review management? Should I care about managing online reviews of my property? Is there a easy way to manage reviews? Check out 4 simple activities that define review management and learn about simple ways to track your online reputation that could lead to increased revenue.

What is Review Management?

Review management refers to managing your customer's feedback about your business and improving your online reputation. Review management involves the following four distinct activities:

1. Monitoring the web for your customer feedback. Depending on the industry, there are a host of websites that collect reviews from customers. For hotels, TripAdvisor and Yelp are some of the leading online review sites.
2. Listening to your customers, understanding & recognizing service gaps and customer expectations.
3. Communicating with customers by replying back to those feedbacks and reviews in a timely manner and addressing their concerns, and
4. Growing your positive online presence by soliciting reviews from your most satisfied customers.

Why do you need to manage reviews?

Online reviews about your business directly affects your future revenue.

Here are some important facts about online hotel booking and hotel reviews from StatisticBrain.com, eMarketer, eTrack & Alexa as of 2012.

• 57% of travel reservations are made on the internet
• 81% of travelers find user reviews important while making an online booking
• 49% of travelers won't book a hotel without reviews
• 14% worldwide increase in online hotel bookings in 2013

Studies show that there is a direct relationship between good online reviews and room bookings. The opposite holds true for negative reviews, which has shown declines in bookings and revenue.

In most of the developed countries such as USA and European countries, about 80% of all hotel bookings take place online or are searched and found online. In emerging countries such as China & India, it ranges from 15-40% depending on the hotel budget and the city. Most customers want to book the best hotels available in their budget. Potential customers look at hotels reviews from prior customers who have stayed in the hotel. More often than not, a hotel with several negative reviews or lower rating score is quickly ignored by potential customers. Since online booking through OTAs could contribute significantly to your hotels revenue, your online reputation or review score affects your future revenue. Hence it is absolutely important to maintain a good online reputation of your hotel or restaurant or any other property for that matter. The business risk of ignoring them is much higher.

How do I manage my customer reviews?

Your customers post their feedback at a number of places on the web. Review sites such as TripAdvisor.com and Yelp constitute majority of hotel reviews. Top online travel agents (OTAs) such as booking.com, expedia.com, hotels.com, priceline.com, agoda.com, makemytrip.com, etc. also capture a significant amount of reviews from verified customers that booked the hotel through the OTA. Other sites such as BBB.org and many consumer complaint sites capture fewer but equally important reviews. Monitoring all your reviews, identifying service gaps, acting and responding in a timely manner, and systematically requesting reviews from your satisfied customer base could be time and resource consuming. Hence the need for a tool that automates many of these tasks and guides hotel's management on how to improve and maintain your online reputation.

Online review monitoring and management tools such as TrackNGrow allows you to consolidate all your reviews into one simple and easy to use interface. It monitors the web for new reviews being posted by your customers. It alerts you every time it find new postings. It guides you to post your comments on your customer feedback. It has a host of sample comments and guidelines on what to say when. It also enables you to request illegitimate review removal on major sites. TrackNGrow's review management tool also enables hotel managers to request reviews from your satisfied customers. All of these at a very affordable price.