In today’s business world, when taking into consideration the connectivity of people and the mobile-first society, it’s safe to say that guest feedback is the thing that can make or break your hotel marketing strategy.

Especially when it comes to hospitality, reviews are something that help or harm the success of your hotel. They also either encourage more bookings or prevent travelers from booking.

Excellent, good or not so great, they are all there in the virtual world, representing your hotel’s reputation. The good news is that, once you learn how to manage them, you can use them in your favor and make guests the ambassadors of your hotel.

Here are 5 tips on how to incorporate guest reviews into your hotel marketing strategy:

1. Respond to reviews, both positive and negative

This is probably the most important thing when it comes to making good use of guest feedback. When you ignore a guest’s opinion and/or suggestion, you make them feel unappreciated or is their experience in your hotel does not concern you. Regardless of what type of review you are facing, you need to take responsibility for the good and for the not-so-good. This will not only show your previous guests that you care. It’s a simple yet effective way of advertising the fact that you value your customers and you take their input into consideration, in order to meet their needs and expectations.

When in doubt, you can always check our previous best practice guides, to learn the best way to reply to positive reviews and to negative reviews.

2. Include Meta-Reviews and Widgets on your website

Let’s think for a moment about what we all do when deciding to make a purchase on Amazon, for example. It’s safe to assume that most of us check the product reviews, to see if it’s worth the buy or not. This is what a Meta-Review does for your hotel: it provides a summary of previous guests’ opinions and feedback, a quick way of evaluating the key attributes of the establishment. TrustYou Meta-Review and TrustScore represent verified review summaries that are displayed on dozens of travel and search sites worldwide, including Google and allow your hotel’s reputation to influence millions of travelers. And there’s no better way to reach those heights than by advertising your hotel’s features and score on its own website.

3. Make use of Rich Snippets

Rich Snippets are not something that you casually mention in an everyday conversation, but they are one of Google’s best features when it comes to visibility. Providing extra information underneath your page title and URL in the search engine results, rich snippets can help promote your hotel’s meta-review. And by displaying your reputation out in plain site, straight on the search engine page, you take an extra step in making sure that travelers don’t scroll past your hotel. Keep in mind that rich snippets can only be added for a score that is visible to the visitors on your website, by using structured data markup. To get more familiar with rich snippets and ways of using them, you can start here.

4. Encourage guests to share their reviews on social media

There’s no denying that social media is is one of the most effective pieces of a hotel marketing strategy. By taking the initiative of using a survey, you not only make sure that the reviews that you get are verified, but you can also use them for social media exposure. TrustYou Stars is an advanced guest satisfaction survey tool that allows hotels to actively collect post-stay reviews. The feature enables you to ask guests to share their feedback on Google and Facebook, allowing them to influence a large number of travelers.

5. Incorporate the guest feedback on your hotel website

While it is important to launch your guests’ feedback into the vast sea of social media, this goes the other way around, too. A very good way of showing appreciation towards clients’ reviews is to incorporate them into your hotel’s website. This is the exact purpose that was attributed to the Social Gallery Widget feature of TrustYou Analytics & Radar. Integrating social content on a hotel website, through Social Gallery widget is a simple step that can add emotional value. It also gives insights into experiences and personal stories and that is something that encourages travelers to book directly. 

Reputation management solutions help hotels incorporate these best practices into their hotel marketing strategy. To start turning guest reviews into hotel bookings, sign up for a free 14-day trial of TrustYou Analytics.

TrustYou, the world’s largest guest feedback platform, is on a mission to improve the travel experience, from finding the right hotel to having the perfect stay. The company works with hotels, destinations, and travel websites to make that happen. TrustYou analyzes hundreds of millions of travel reviews scattered across a vast, fragmented market and transforms this content into actionable insights and data visualizations for 500,000 hotels. This enables travel sites to improve the trip planning process and hotels to offer the best experience to their guests.

www.trustyou.com