Huge Review Volume = Big Time Investment?

AtlantisThePalm_05

Atlantis, The Palm Dubai Shares Insights On How It Manages Its Online Reviews to Maintain Exceptional Quality and Service

Alan Lim, Director Projects & Quality at Atlantis, The Palm Dubai shares insights of his company and the partnership with TrustYou.

The Atlantis is well known as a luxury 5-star hotel with over 1,500 hotel rooms, situated on the Palm, a man-made island located off Dubai’s coastline. Founded in 2008 Atlantis, The Palm already accommodated a countless number of tourists from all over the world.

Q: Hello Mr. Lim, thank you for having us here today. First of all we wanted to congratulate you – the Atlantis has won several awards this year!

A: Thank you very much! Yes, we are very excited to have won the 2014 World Travel Award for “Dubai’s Leading Resort” as well as the “Middle East’s Leading Resort Award”. We’ve also won The Middle East Hotel Award for “Best Hotel Suite” and “Best Restaurant”. We feel very honoured to receive so much praise and recognition. It’s a great motivation for all of us working at the Atlantis.

Q: With all these awards, your hotel is clearly doing something right. What is your secret to success?

A: I think it is all about making the customer happy. We have to understand what the customer expects from our resort, then work to meet – and exceed – those expectations. Our team is extremely passionate about creating amazing experiences and everlasting memories. At the end of the day, we want our guests to have the best holiday they could imagine.

Q: Great point. So, how do you stay up to date on what your customers expect from your hotel?

A: We review and analyse guest feedback, and channel the knowledge and learning back into our processes. We believe that when a guest takes the time to review a hotel, it is imperative to understand and proactively extract pertinent insights that can help us to enhance their future experiences at the hotel. That said, you can imagine how difficult it is to keep track of and consolidate every travel platform that posts reviews. For example, our resort gets more than 500 reviews per month! To make this process easier to handle, Atlantis The Palm started working with TrustYou in 2012. With TrustYou, we can monitor and analyse all reviews globally. It supports us in gaining an overview of our global online reputation as well as keeps track the performance of hotels we benchmark against. The flexibility and robustness of TrustYou has given us a significant edge in our benchmarking capabilities, by having access to insights from potential customer segments.

Q: Could you provide any statistics about your online reputation and how you are tracking it?

A: Of course. Our hotel has gained – and maintains – an “excellent” TrustScore. This is the highest rating a hotel can achieve and we want to maintain this standard! We also track and benchmark our performance in key categories like service, rooms, food and beverage, etc. And, if we can detect even the slightest negative trend in any statistics we can quickly address and fix the problem. Above that we also strive for service excellence in our 21 Food and Beverage outlets by using TrustYou’s Restaurant tool.

Q: Some say that online reputation (from user generated content and reviews) will replace traditional systems like star ratings or paid advertising. What are your thoughts?

A: I don’t want to assume what will happen in the future, as nobody can really know. But, we see increasing reliance on consumer reviews and higher propensity for guests to share their opinions and experiences online. Reviews are certainly becoming an important component of a hotel’s reputation, so it is wise for hoteliers to closely monitor what is said about their properties online. I do see that the vast amount of unstructured content online may be a problem. Management may be getting weary of reading through so many reviews, at times conflicting, exaggerated, or even downright untrue. However, reputation monitoring products designed to help consolidate and aggregate sentiments, highlight trends and provide review summaries will become an essential tool in the management toolkit. TrustYou seems to be onto this trend, releasing its review summaries and Meta-Reviews. I’m interested to see what the future holds with these snippets!

 

Photo Source: laingorourke.com