It’s been a busy weekend just come and gone. No problems with checkouts and with occupancy as it was, well, it was good and your team was holding its own. You then go to your OTA dashboard and discover a 3-star Review: “Nice place, but people at check-in seemed disorganized.
It stings. Now, the rub of the week is that this review is one of the best bits of data that your property collected all week.
Guest reviews, whether acquired via Booking.com, Airbnb, Google Reviews or by email after the trip, are raw intelligence. Things that treat it as such grow on properties. Properties that don’t get it or act defensively settle into a rut. More often than not, it’s about having the systems in place to listen, organize and take action on what your guests are saying.
Let’s discuss the ways of creating that system.
Avoid seeing reviews as a PR issue.
The first mental step that all hoteliers must take is that the perceived feedback is not a reputation problem, it is an operations problem.
If a guest comments that the check-in process was hectic, it’s a cue to look at your front desk procedure. If they say that they weren’t ready on time, it’s a sign that you lack in coordinating housekeeping. If they sing their staff member’s name, that is an insight of recognition which your HR process should be picking up.
Most of the little and medium sized hotels are reading a poor review, they make a polite response in public and they move on. That is just damage control and not improvement. To make real improvements, feedback needs to be linked to the areas of the operation that the feedback is focused at.
Integrate feedback from all feedback sources.
If you are listed on Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb or any other OTA, then you understand the hassle: feedback is spread out on five dashboards, with each having its own user interface and notification system.
This is where a good hotel management system that integrates channel managers comes into play. An integrated platform aggregates all your reservations, your OTA performance data and all the feedback signals associated with each booking source; no need to log in into each OTA and track them separately.
If you can see that guests who book through one OTA are consistently giving the cleanliness rating lower score when compared to the guests who book through other OTA, then that’s something you can do something about. Perhaps the images on that channel are misleading with regards to the actual content. Perhaps there are other qualities that are important to them. It would be hard to discern by examining the channels individually.
Make a feedback part of your processes, not just your marketing.
A practical solution that’s perfect for all hotels and guest houses, no matter their size:
- Gather systematically – not randomly!
Create automated emails immediately after a person checks out, which are sent 24 hours later. Be concise – 1 or 2 questions. What could we have done better? The majority of guests will NOT complete a lengthy survey, but a brief response will take 30 seconds. With a good hotel management system you can automate these touch points right from your booking information.
The follow up will be automatically activated when a booking ends. No manual work and no lost guests. - Use the tags and categories you’ve assigned to help you organize the items you encounter.
Create automated emails immediately after a person checks out, which are sent 24 hours later. Be concise – 1 or 2 questions. What could we have done better? The majority of guests will NOT complete a lengthy survey, but a brief response will take 30 seconds.
With a good hotel management system you can automate these touch points right from your booking information. The follow up will be automatically activated when a booking ends. No manual work and no lost guests.
You don’t want to miss out on any feedback, even if it is a review, direct message or a survey response, someone in your team should tag it. Did the comment refer to: Room quality? Staff behavior? Check-in/check-out process? Food and beverage? Cleanliness? Value for money?
This may seem like a pain, but you will begin to notice trends in just a month by categorizing it on a weekly basis on a basic spreadsheet. The process can be semi-automated with the appropriate software, when keywords can be identified and directed to the proper department. - Review it in a weekly operations meeting
Guest feedback should be on the agenda on a regular basis. All the bad reviews and more. So what are visitors enjoying? What do you think happened 3 times this week? What was the first thing that was mentioned?
If you make weekly operations input of feedback, instead of monthly PR review, then your team will stay responsive and it won’t feel like theory anymore, it will feel like action.
Use the feedback from your negative reviews to improve your training!
A negative review makes you feel uncomfortable. They are extremely targeted training resources, too.
When a guest tells you exactly how it went wrong with them (the tone in which a front desk agent spoke to them, how they were treated when they complained, when they felt that they were ignored etc.) it’s more valuable than any generic hospitality training script written. In your team briefing use real feedback (unless published anonymously).
The best hotels to improve are not necessarily the ones that are the fewest to complain. They are the ones where the team hears complaints, they have an open discussion with the complainant and change their course rapidly.
Prioritize your investment decisions with Feedback.
Do you want to update the bathroom or the bed linen? To have an additional housekeeper or to invest in improved in-room WiFi?
One of the tools least used in making these calls is guest feedback. If you can find WiFi quality in 15% of your reviews and bathroom aesthetics in 2% of your reviews, you know you have a solid investment priority, and you have the data to support you when you’re talking to your partners and/or investors about your budget.
The decision-making process for an improvement of a property can be taken out of the guesswork by using a hotel management platform that can gather and display this sort of information.
React — to drive change rather than change for the sake of appearances
Answer to your reviews (yes). Your OTA rankings will be higher and future guests will know that you’re paying attention if you’re responding in a timely and personalized way. However, don’t stop there!
The place that answers “We’re so sorry, we’ll do better!”, to each review and does nothing about it is lying to itself – and the algorithm. OTAs monitor the trend of ratings over time. If scores go up year after year, it’s a quality rating, if they are flat, it’s a complacency rating.
Not only are the properties doing well, but they’re also responding well on Booking.com, Expedia and Google. These are truly improving; the reviews bear this out.
Competitive Edge is Systematic, Not Heroic
It doesn’t require you to make a whole lot of changes at your property. You must have a system, gather feedback on multiple channels, centralize this feedback, categorize it, review it frequently and act on the patterns based on this feedback.
An advantage for properties with an integrated hotel management system – where reservation, OTA channels, guest communications, and operations workflow are all integrated – is that they can leverage their structural layout here. All the ingredients are in a single location. The data connects. The feedback loop is faster closed.
Guest satisfaction is NOT a soft goal! It impacts your review scores, your OTA ranking, your repeat booking rate and of course your RevPAR. The properties that win on those criteria aren’t speculating. They’re paying attention – and they have the roadmap in place to take action on what they hear.
Ready to bring all your guest feedback, OTA channels, and hotel operations into one platform? Explore how our hotel management system helps properties like yours turn guest insights into consistent improvement — and consistent growth.