Hotel Bad Review Website

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Today I’ll be having a meeting later this afternoon regarding management og hotel online review. This will probably apply to most businesses and not hotel alone. Below is my research. I classified them into 3 categories.

1) What are they complaining about
-    Staff – Rude, not helpful, bad service.
-    Aging property – Needs refurbishing, Dirty Blankets & towels etc
-    Food – Lousy food, not much choices etc
-    Facilities – Not much recreational activities, website mentions gym but not well equipped.

2) How to remove bad reviews from the Internet
Contact the webmasters of the site where the negative comment is posted and politely ask for the content to be removed. Most of the time they will not remove it, but it’s worth a try. An alternative is to pay them to remove it (final resort).

Get a list of satisfied customers to give us good comments on review website such as Travelocity, Tripadvisor, VirtualTourist and others that contain the bad review. Those surfing will probably ignore the bad review after seeing so many good ones.

Seek for all the negative reviews that are below 1 month old and reply to them with an apology.

Bad reviews are most probably not removable from the website. For these situations, we have to find other means of not allowing users to search this review. One suggestion is that the Usage of social media such as Facebook and Friendster. We should find all Positive reviews available and link them to this facebook account so that people will read them first. Similarly we should also have these links on our corporate and mini website.

Post our hotel profile on many online directory website, wikis, so that they will appear on the first few pages on search engine and push down the bad review websites. One other way is to have our own blog and update it constantly. Being active in hotel forums will help too.

Create a channel on Youtube to post videos of all that is happening in the hotel, including F&B promos, packages, things to do and so on. This will also help in the ranking of the hotel in search engines. If you show people what they can expect when they arrive at the hotel, they wouldn’t bother about the bad reviews.

Offer cash, we can offer a cash settlement in exchange for having the negative information taken down, this might hurt our price a little but when compared to the lost sales, it might be a good idea.

3) Avoiding bad reviews in the first place
Front office Managers should ask all guests who are checking out whether they had a pleasant stay. For those who complain, it should be attended to immediately. Hotel GMs should also randomly ask guests during their stay whether everything is ok. I experienced this when I was at Cherating Holiday Villa, the GM managed to detect a few unhappy guests by just casually talking to them. This shows a good relationship with your clients and most of the time they will not leave a bad review on the Internet.

Send out an acknowledgement email or thank you email a few days after the customer checks out. Also leave him a 4-5 question questionnaire to rate his stay. This shows that we are interested to know about his stay and that we are concerned if he was unhappy. We should also invite them to join our Facebook account so that they can leave us some positive review.
Hope that you’ll can assist in getting me more points for this meeting.