Updated 25 Jun 2020
Is your property easy to find on the OTA’s? Are there many reviews about your property? What kinds of reviews are being left? The answers to these questions will impact your revenue. If you are not on the first page of searches on the OTA’s then you are already at a disadvantage to your competitors. Aside from paying more commission, which nobody wants to do, one of the best ways to improve ranking on the OTA’s is through conversion rates. Your conversion rate is calculated by comparing the number of visits to your property webpage on OTAs compared to the number of these visits that result in a booking. This can be a bit of a ‘catch 22’ though because in order to be listed higher you need to convert more bookings, but to convert more bookings you need to be listed higher. One way of doing this is by closely monitoring your guest reviews. Are you only finding negative reviews? If so this would be detrimental for potential guests who like to research properties before staying. As this survey from 2015 shows, over 90% of people asked stated that ratings on a review site were crucial to whether or not they would book.
The next question to be asked then is what can you do to improve your online reputation? First of all well rounded reviews set realistic expectations, so you should ensure that you are encouraging all guests to leave reviews for your property, not just those who you believe will leave good reviews. You will be doing yourself and future guests a disservice as you may miss something that you could easily improve upon. Keep in mind that guests are much more likely to leave a review if they are unhappy with aspects of their stay. Therefore you will need to find a way of encouraging your happy guests to leave a review of your services; this can be as simple as having Twitter, Facebook or Trip Advisor icons around the reception desk to signify that guests can engage with your property, another way is host a contest in which to enter you would need to leave a review on one of the above sites of your choice. This can go a long way to ensure that the balance of positive and negative reviews is not tipped more towards negative reviews as this may have a serious effect on whether future guests choose to stay with you or with a competitor instead and therefore losing you potential revenue.
By inviting all guests to review their stay, you are also exuding confidence that your property is providing the best experience possible. If you are not confident in this, then the more reviews you get, the more likely you are to improve upon some of your weaker elements by analysing the negative points. How you react to these negative reviews is just as important as receiving positive reviews. Is this the first time you’ve seen this kind of feedback or is a trend developing? If you take your time to look at the reviews objectively you may be able to find the root of the problem and weed this out for future guests. Be open minded, positive, and professional in your response, the quicker you respond to a negative review in a professional and open manner, the more significant the impact will be on the reviewer and people who read or comment on this review. If you are able to show potential clients that you are able to adapt to changes that would benefit your guests, then these potential customers would have more confidence in booking with you and therefore negating any impact these negative reviews may have on your revenue.
Enhancing your online reputation is an effective way to see increases in your revenue. Some Hoteliers unfortunately do not have the staff or the time to implement the action or changes needed to make this work, and this is where CultBooking comes in. CultBooking is best in class hotel booking engine that has partnered up with CultSwitch and BookingBooster, performance based agencies, helping hotels and property owners generate more business and success through the optimisation of your content and online presence. They ensure that you are among the top listings on all OTA’s that you work with so that your property is easily found, and more appealing to visitors of these sites than any potential competitors. CultBooking and BookingBooster aims to increase your revenue by at least 30%. For more information visit our website at http://www.cultbooking.com/