Patrick Wassel, Head of Digital Strategy, Faktor 3 AG, a firm specializing in online strategy, at ITB Berlin 2013 brought experts together to discuss the effectiveness of social media as a rating and feedback platform, in the travel industry.

His pretext summarizing social media through an informationsearching traveler's eyes: "I do not want to read a lot of text, I only want to make a quick decision."

Dirk Führer, Chief Commercial Officer, Steigenberger Hotels AG, one of Europe's leading premium hotel brands, said that Steigenberger has already begun asking its guests to leave their feedback decades ago, "a long time before the internet age… the online method has only facilitated this process".

Führer underlined how important it was for the Steigenberger Group to build up an online reputation, particularly via its guests' feedback. He believes that an online presence and feedback platforms is much more effective than traditional advertising means.

"We do not ignore social media. It is important to us! We want to know what people are saying about us on Twitter or Facebook, as well as on other sites, so as to understand every aspect of how our brand is being perceived. We want a 360 degree view", he told the panel.

Response is a must within 48 hours

"More importantly to our receiving feedback is our responding to it within 48 hours," Führer added The Steigenberger Manager is not deterred by negative feedback, since it makes the entire process "credible". He also knows that some customers simply cannot be placated, "but we have to live with that", he said.

He and his teams use customer feedback to identify issues and resolve them as quickly as possible. Benjamin Jost, CEO of Trust You, an online portal that gathers and semantically structures online opinions, reviews, posts and comments, said that online social networks are the sales channels of hotels, today. Trust You considers itself a reputation management adviser for hotels. They look into and respond to user feedback in a timely manner, providing their clients with analyzed data which, in time, drives hotel revenue.

Jost pointed out that Google+ and TripAdvisor are more important than Facebook or Twitter, because they are more "feedback focused" and allow users make qualified decisions since they act as a sort of price and quality matrix.

Social Media Panel: Dirk Führer, Benjamin Jost, Torsten Sabel, Adam Medros (left to right)

Hotels profit climbs through guest reviews

"Our findings show that a hotel's revenue goes up 5% per 30 reviews it receives". Jost said. Reviews are not enough, however. Review distribution and data collection is equally as important, as a strategic tool to gain more positive reviews. "Only then do we actually see revenues increasing," Jost added.

Review distribution is important since different portals cater to slightly different clients. He recommends his customers, the hotels, encourage their customers to leave their feedback and ratings on particular platforms which might benefit them the most. "So sometimes we recommend our clients to send their clients to TripAdivsor, at other times, we might see Google+ being more beneficial to them. For a specific clientele, we would recommend HRS, for example, " Jost told the panel.

Benjamin Jost underlined that the biggest challenge for consumers today is filtering all the content that is available to them on the web – being driven to the right site which will lead them to make a relevant travel decision.

According to Jost, online feedback is nothing more than "a ranking with a text". Important is that these online portals need to lead the consumer to the relevant information they are seeking, immediately. For example, a user looking at a romantic hotels site wants to know, through the reviews, what is so ‘romantic' about them.

To-date, not all online platforms allow for management responses. This is slowly changing. "In the future, a hotel's image on a review site will be commensurate to its response rate," Jost said. Trust You encourages its hotels to respond to both negative and positive reviews – because response rates catapult a hotel's visibility further up in the search rankings. The linking of the CRM and SRE industry will grow together – to better allow hotel management, for example, to know a  previous customer's past experience before he gets to the hotel and to allow him to better interact with the customer when he comes back.

Adam manages worldwide product development for TripAdvisor, overseeing improvements to TripAdvisor's core functionality, international expansion, and development of a wide variety of travel planning features, including TripAdvisor Mobile and TripAdvisor Facebook applications. He confirms that his company's reviews influence people's decisions in booking a trip and, simultaneously help travel businesses grow, particularly the small businesses which are given the same visibility as are the market giants.

People are not always looking for the cheapest

"Our studies show that hoteliers with positive reviews saw that they could raise their prices by 11% without having their bookings drop. People are not always looking for the cheapest. They are looking for good. We help hotels grow their businesses by providing them a platform, including CSR functions  – making both the customer's and the hoteliers experience better, " Medros told the afternoon's panelists.

Receiving written reviews is the most important marketing tool for hotels today. "Reviews say a lot about a suppliers branding, it increases their reputation on a neutral, thus credible platform… Reviews on a supplier's own website is risky, since they tend to be looked at as biased, an own site usually risks biased reviews," Medros added.

Medros learned that people write reviews where they are read. As such, TripAdvisor partnered with Facebook, facilitating TripAdvisor access directly from a user's Facebook account, for example. "One in three of our reviews are Facebook connected. That over time will have a powerful impact on review conversion (how many people finish that review) and how that leads to people making decisions," Medros said. Since users are continually on Facebook, they are apt to complete the reviews posted from there.

TripAdvisor is currently encouraging people to write longer reviews because they tend to be more credible. Longer reviews - which might include itineraries, hotels, restaurants – allows readers to emulate a previous traveler's trip.

Furthermore, TripAdvisor encourages hotel management responses to reviews – highlighting those hotels, for example, which do so. TripAdvisor put the mechanism "was the review helpful" in place in order to allow users to rank the reviews themselves.

By 2015 most hotels will have implemented the mobile and social reputation management strategy as a part of their management principals. "The others will simply not be found easily, online," Medros concluded.

Torsten Sabel, one of the founders of Customer Alliance, a leading provider of hotel management systems and travel rater, agreed with the other panelists that social-media monitoring is of utmost importance. He told the panel that hotel management currently regards "word of mouth as their most important marketing tool. "Thus, hotel managers need to get their guests to leave their feedback and respond to them.

25% of the guests will review if asked to do so

Usually bad experiences get the most reviews. "So one needs to begin encouraging the 90% who do not leave any review, to give feedback," Sabel said. One of his studies shows that 25% of all hotel guests are willing to write a review when asked to do so.

Sabel said that content was equally important to ratings. "Ratings could be based on bias or a mistaken click of the mouse," he said. Thus, he encouraged hoteliers to encourage customers to leave lengthier reviews – calling them "essential."

The founder of Customer Alliance agreed with Benjamin Jost in suggesting that customers focus on review channels most beneficial to them. Holiday Check, Tribago, etc., alternatives to TripAdvisor, have their own market shares. "It is not important to appear on all rankings… First the right sales channel needs to be sourced and then the ranking platforms sought accordingly," Sabel said. He added that the fake review problem can only be resolved if everyone leaves a review. "In this way the fake ones will simply become so insignificant, and disintergrate".

Sabel concluded that further studies are needed in order to better understand the correlation between social media reviews and business revenue as well as the impact they leave behind.

This is strictly an exclusive feature, reprints of this article in any shape or form without prior written approval from 4Hoteliers.com is not permitted.

Roland Wildberg is Travel Writer and Correspondent based in Berlin, Germany. He started as an Editor for the National daily 'Die Welt' (tourism section), later on switched to a freelanced career and nowadays mainly publishes on the Web. Observing the hospitality industry always has fascinated him as it looks like the perfect combination of sleeping and writing – work-live-balance as its best.

Roland also heads the annual 4Hoteliers ITB Berlin news micro-site journalist and video/photo teams for the 5th consecutive year.

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