I was talking to Ann Manion yesterday, a highly regarded hospitality consultant, who focuses on hotel reputation management with her new company Hotel Advantage. She and I were on the phone for nearly an hour talking about independent hotel trends as it relates to PR, content, messaging and the complex world of maintaining an excellent reputation in a rich media world.
We both have similar perspectives on hospitality, though practice different areas in communication. We touched on several topics and found that it isn’t easy to manage a hotel’s reputation, especially when the property is independently owned and managed. It takes a dedicated effort to respond properly to anything from horrific reviews, poorly positioned articles, and bad blog posts that unfortunately GMs have no control over in a social media environment. As the old saying goes, when you can’t control what happens around you, you can still control your reactions (or ”freactions” as I like to call them).
Sometimes hotels take poor reviews very personally, and it’s tempting to lash out and become defensive on a response post on TripAdvisor, Yelp, etc. While a response is the right course of action, it should be well thought out and positioned in a constructive way. Chances are you may lose the guest who had a negative experience anyway, but the way you respond will speak mountains to those potential guests who read the thread for years to come.
Ann had some excellent points on hotel reputation management via social media media, and how important it is to train the right staff to guard a hotel’s message. Keeping things viral isn’t enough, it is about maintaining quality in the overall social media marketing strategy. Right now, there is still too much information out there on the web that should be shaken out.
And unfortunately, there are still many independent hotels who don’t feel ready to grasp the opportunities social media can offer in the travel and hospitality world. However, the more hotels understand the concept of content quality in the social media sphere, the more hotels will be apt to give it a try.
I believe that the ones who have created a social media strategy (and actually followed through with it), even as a simple means to market their message, have not looked back.
Tags: bad hotel reviews, hospitality social media, hotel marketing communications, hotel pr, hotel reputation management, responding to poor reviews, social media PR, tripadvisor andd hotels