The Guest Feedback A-Z Guide For Hotels: Part I

Hospitality is a giant industry, constantly growing, constantly changing and improving and guest feedback plays an important role throughout every step of the guest journey. While swimming in such deep waters, knowing and understanding all of its complex implications can sometimes come as a challenge. Especially since technology has started to impact hospitality and the importance of reviews and continues to do so, more and more every day, new and exciting concepts arise and you have to make sure that you keep up with them.

This is why we created the Guest Feedback A-Z Guide for Hotels, meant to break down all of the most relevant notions that are of interest to hoteliers and other members of the industry. We included short definitions and external references and divided the guide into 4 equal parts, so make sure to stay tuned for the entire series!

A  

Analytics = This is a term used to describe the processes or the platforms that allow you to analyze your performance, score, demographics, KPIs, etc. In other words, analytics are crucial for absolutely any business out there and especially for hospitality. In order to plan, organize and succeed, you need to know your audience, your current performance, your reputation, your strengths, and weaknesses. Given the importance of the analytics, the TrustYou platform has them incorporated so that users could monitor their performance and reputation, analyze feedback on a semantic level, measure KPIs with custom reports and find and influence their impact scores.

B

Bookings = Basically, every hotel’s goal. A booking represents a reservation made by a traveler, who makes the decision of enjoying a stay at a certain accommodation. Bookings can be made through a multitude of channels, however, the preferred way is the direct one, on the hotel’s website. Bookings are also enabled through the collaboration between hotels and online travel agencies (OTAs), which implies the payment of a commission. This is why direct bookings are more budget-friendly and always encouraged and we have previously touched base on how to get consumers to book directly to better compete with OTA’s.

C

CRM = Short for customer relationship management, CRM software is necessary for  hospitality. Through such systems, hoteliers ensure that operations between the hotel and its guests are properly optimized and as smooth as possible. CRMs are used to reach, impress and retain customers and also, to generate brand loyalty. Especially in hospitality, relationships between hotel representatives and customers are crucial, in order to keep guests informed and satisfied and to reach a higher level of popularity, plus a better reputation.

D

Direct Messaging = In hospitality, direct messaging has been recently adopted as an easy and highly effective two-way communication between the hotel staff and the guests. Given the technology-driven era that we are currently living in, it has been proven that the modern traveler prefers to communicate via text rather than through the phone, email or sometimes, even face-to-face. Every day, more hotels are relying on direct messaging to keep the lines of communications opened during the entire guest journey, which can result in higher satisfaction levels from guests. At TrustYou, we developed our Messaging tool and have worked on constantly improving it through voice-messaging (using Amazon Echo’s “Alexa”) and a live chat feature. You can read more on the topic in these posts: 5 Reasons Not to Be Afraid of Direct Messaging Your Guests, Direct Messaging Guests: The On-site Experience, Voice Messaging through AI – The Future Of Communication In Hospitality, How Live Chat Can Improve The Guest Experience.

E

E-commerce = This is the general name given to all the transactions - buying and selling - which take place in the online environment. For the hospitality business, this refers to any business transaction that is made electronically, without the actual face-to-face interaction and it can range from online marketing to online bookings. Our friends from Xotels define e-commerce in the hotelier field as “the trade and service relationship between the hotel and their guests and partners” and “it is mainly based on sales made via the hotel’s website and the partner OTAs”.

F

Feedback = The overall impressions, opinions, and experiences that a guest has during his stay in a hotel. Guest feedback is something that we focus our entire activity around since it has developed from word-of-mouth to an entire industry and now represents one of the things that can make or break a business. The majority of today’s consumers search reviews online, before making a booking decision and this is why a hotel’s positive reputation is vital. Through feedback, hoteliers can analyze their strengths and weaknesses and adjust accordingly, in order to achieve an excellent reputation, which can drive more bookings and more revenue. Nowadays, feedback is generated through a multitude of channels and this is why hoteliers need to invest in a guest feedback platform, such as the one that we carefully developed and continuously improve, so that hotels all around the world can make the most out of their reputation. For more details about our complex, all-in-one feedback platform, please contact us.

If you want the full Guest Feedback A-Z Guide For Hotels, you can download it for free here.