Online Revealed Calgary 2008

SOCIAL COMMUNITY Hotel Review Sites One of the Best Things that Happened to the Hotel Industry By Edward Perry s a first step of many in the direction of Web 2.0 type services for our customers, my company recently implemented the hotel reviews of TripAdvisor on our new brand website. Although we knew that the measure would be welcomed by most of our properties, we also suspected that some may be skeptical of our course. Although we certainly did receive some feedback of “shock and awe”, the surprising result was that most of our hotels wholeheartedly embraced this measure. After all, they were already confident in their product and welcomed the ability to show consumers how certain of the product they sell every day. A blame the customer and go about our daily work? Finally, in the case of TripAdvisor reviews, do we hoteliers submit managerial reviews to our customer who has been ‘kind’ enough to write about our property? Whether the review is good or bad, we owe it to our customer to thank him/her for feedback that took time and energy to make. If it does not kill us, feedback makes us stronger and enables us to grow as an industry. If you have a superior product, customers will be the soundboard of your success and help you to grow as a business. Yes, they will point out the uncomfortable realities of our growing pains, but they provide advice that would cost us thousands of dollars in mystery shopping visits to replicate. If you have a good product with bad service, the consumer will be also be clear about that as well. Don’t expect any concessions from today’s customer. They will be blunter than days gone by. In fact, let a customer walk away without a reasonable problem solved and they will tell more people than you know how to handle. That’s why we need to empower our colleagues in the hotel industry to make customercentric decisions at all touch points of the guest experience, right on the spot-no waiting around! If there is a problem to fix, fix it with the customer in focus then go back and discuss it internally. You never know, you may get a positive comment for actually fixing an otherwise “ugly” situation. Back to my premise: hotel review sites are our friends and represent one of the best things that have happened to our business. They have raised the bar of customer service standards industry wide. They have made us stronger by revealing our weaknesses (so we can fix them) but also our strengths (which we know that we have). Hotels are in the business of providing hospitality. The next time that you look at your own hotel’s reviews, thank the customer for the valuable feedback they provide about your own hospitality. They have just contributed to an industry in which “expecting more” is the standard and empowering us to develop new innovative services for our guests. The better we do our jobs, the more consumers will visit us and the more profitable we will all be. Thank you, hotel review sites! You have done us well Working with hotels on a daily basis to increase their market share, I am amazed by how few hotels embrace social network sites as part of their overall sales and marketing strategy. In fact, if you spoke to most hoteliers candidly, you would think that hotel sites maliciously snuck up to us all like the ‘reaper in the night’, causing havoc on their properties and their reputations. Fortunately for the consumer, these site have been around for a long time in one form or another, we have simply been to busy to pay attention. Ah, remember the “good-old-days” when we were able to cultivate the consumer by adding carefully selected testimonials of our best clients on our website. It seems like the world was all rosy. A few years later, enter your disgruntled consumer that has no affinities and tells you and the world the way they really feel about a property. Now all of a sudden the world is not so fair and we are all riled up. How could they!!…They must be a competitor!! I hear interesting reactions all the time. In most cases, we have only ourselves to blame. We as an industry have not embraced hotel review sites as much as we could. How many of us actually have a designated liaison on the property level that reads hotel review sites on a weekly basis? Once we get a review (good or bad) what do we do with it? If we get great reviews, do we share our successes with our colleagues at the property to congratulate them for a job well done? If we get negative reviews, do we address the consumer’s issue so that the scenario is less likely to happen again on property? Or do we become emotional, 10 | ONLINE REVEALED CANADA 2008 | onlinerevealed.com Edward Perry, Director of E-Commerce, WORLDHOTELS. With over 20 years of industry exposure, and with WORLDHOTELS for over six. During his tenure at WORLDHOTELS, he began in the corporate sales division, managing sales for the Northeastern USA. His most current appointment is as Director of E-Commerce, based in the Americas. In this position, Edward manages strategic alliances between online booking and technology partners and WORLDHOTELS' portfolio. Edward has been an enthusiastic supporter and friend of the Online Revealed team since the beginning! http://www.booking.com http://www.booking.com http://www.onlinerevealed.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Online Revealed Calgary 2008

Online Revealed Calgary 2008 Contents Message From the Editor Blog-itorial Click Here with New Media Blogologue Social Community Web World Online Revealed Canada Conference News Sound Bytes Destination Mash-up! Instant Message Thank you from The Chicks!

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.