Yours insincerely... the TripAdvisor factorIn her blog, Sally Pope who lives in New South Wales, Australia wrote “We have just returned from a few weeks in Asia and are pondering our old friend TripAdvisor. I have always been happy to write reviews, hoping to help other travellers as I have been helped. However, we have been increasingly uneasy at the way that TripAdvisor is dominating the thoughts of hotel managers and affecting the way they interact with guests. Over-zealous service staff hovering close by, pouncing at the slightest eye contact - can be off-putting. Managers are falling over themselves to attract good write ups, emailing to request reviews, or asking directly at checkout. This makes me wonder at the value of our feedback. Tourists like us contribute to this reliance on TripAdvisor ranking, and perhaps the thing to do now is to avoid writing reviews at all.” Sally does make some interesting observations.
Taking care of guest well-being can be simple and complex, straightforward and ambiguous. When I check in to a hotel, I expect my needs to be met. When that happens I am satisfied. When my expectations are unmet I am unhappy. There are countless hotels out there that make every effort to please their customers. When hotel staff observes the ‘15 by 10 by’ 5 rule when I walk about the hotel or the‘3 by 3 by’ 3 rule when I am eating in the restaurant, it pleases me. I am made to feel ‘cared for’.
Wonderful lobbies, comfortable beds, well equipped bathrooms, heavenly wellness centres and a wide choice of food in the restaurants can to a great extent consummate guests’ expectations. That is the products connect between the hotel and its guest. This alone though, may not be enough. Competitors can easily imitate, if not offer superior products, and many of these product offerings are simply not affordable to smaller operators because of their costs. Take beds for instance, the majority of hotels opt for foam mattresses because spring mattresses are too expensive.
The most vital cog in the ‘cared for’ equation that sets hotels apart is service - especially when it is delivered by helpful staff. There are countless interactions between guests and staff at every stage of a guest’s hotel stay. A hotel that continuously embeds the values of making guests feel genuinely welcomed and wanted into its culture, and during the training it provides to its staff can only succeed. What it does is prepare its employees for those one-to-one interactions thus ensuring that all the guests feel that the hotel genuinely cares about their well-being. Caring for the sake of persuading the guest to write a review on TripAdvisor is faking it.
Today, online reputation is everything and TripAdvisor is omnipresent in the hotel reputation space. The inescapable fact is that most travellers will eventually end up on TripAdvisor when planning a visit. Sally Pope is absolutely right about TripAdvisor’s influence on hotel managers. Because of its size and power, it is too big to ignore, pressuring hotels, especially the smaller and the standalones, to work ‘with’ them in order to protect their business reputation.
As in the case of Sally’s experience, most hotel managers assume that having more reviews than a rival hotel will guarantee a higher rank. Doesn’t happen that way; TripAdvisor only requires that a hotel has enough reviews to provide statistical significance. Managers who fail to train staff to be responsive, helpful and even anticipate guest needs are the ones who fear negative reviews. Negative reviews at their core, can be attributed to either unmet expectations or poor service.
Guests aren’t pumped up to write reviews when their needs are barely met through ordinary service. A sure way of getting guests to write reviews is to exceed guest expectations and to deliver exceptional service. Hotel managers then don’t have to chase for reviews.
Shafeek Wahab – Editor, Hospitality Sri Lanka, Consultant, Trainer, Ex-Hotelier
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