Standing Dog Interactive has launched ReviewAnalyst, an online dashboard for tracking consumer-generated hotel reviews. It also tracks videos and images on popular travel and social sites.

A simple and affordable platform, offered for $99 a month, ReviewAnalyst has already signed up over 100 properties from Omni Hotels, Rydges Hotels & Resorts and Ocean Properties Limited.

Created to minimize the time and resources needed to monitor hotel reviews, which are estimated to affect as many as 84 percent of travel site visitors' buying decisions, ReviewAnalyst pulls information from sites like TripAdvisor, TravelPost, YouTube, flickr and Google, among others. The tool not only provides reports of information posted to sites, but it also tracks trends through an analysis of the comments made by consumers and facilitates a management response.

"With the advent of Web 2.0, a hotel's image is largely being shaped by consumer generated content about the property," said Michael Wylie, president of Standing Dog. "We've developed ReviewAnalyst to help hotels compete more effectively in this environment by assisting their knowledge of social media and participation in the online discussion. We also help uncover issues and opportunities by identifying problematic areas to be addressed, opportunities to praise the hotel team for high service ratings and discovering strong selling points that may not have been known. Often, these issues and opportunities may be unknown prior to the review analysis."

In beta testing with Ocean Properties, ReviewAnalyst provided hotel reviews as they were posted, along with notifications of posting of images or videos. The simplicity of its information delivery proved a key selling point for Loren Gray, director of e-commerce for Ocean Properties.

"The 10 properties we tested the ReviewAnalyst application with are affected directly by the reviews consumers write. Negative reviews really impact our business," Gray said. "For us, monitoring these sites is essential, and to be able to do that for a low fee with an easy to use application is unparalleled. With ReviewAnalyst, we didn't have to sort through other recommendations or reports on unrelated information, we simply uncovered exactly what content people were generating about our hotels."
 
In addition, ReviewAnalyst will soon offer ratings, reviews and ranking comparisons with a hotel's top three competitors. This will help hotels gauge their competition's social marketing prowess to gain a competitive advantage.
 
More information on ReviewAnalyst is available online at www.reviewanalyst.com. The tool is available to individual hotel properties for $99/month, or through bulk pricing for hotels of 5 or more properties.