4 Steps To Avoid Negative Reviews

Posted on August 17, 2011 by eMax_Rick

In the hotel industry, unhappy guests are a fact of life. They are a part of any general manager’s daily routine and every hotelier is armed with a variety of tactics to deal with them. In the past it was known that one unhappy guest would tell 10 people about their experience. However, in today’s digital age, one unhappy guest can influence thousands of potential customers.

What can a hotel do to avoid the effects of a negative review online? Noted local marketer Mike Blumenthal published: Review Management: 7 Tips on Avoiding Bad Reviews. Here are a few of his tips most applicable for hotels.

1. Follow Up With Customers Immediately After Their Stay
Send a simple email to a guest thanking them for their business and asking them for feedback about their stay. This builds goodwill with the guest and effectively encourages them to contact you with any complaints rather than going directly online.

2. Make The Complaint Process Obvious
When someone is physically in your hotel it is obvious how to lodge a complaint. How about when someone is on your website? There should be a clear and easy place on your website where a guest can register a complaint. Create a simple page with an easy form and add a prominent link on every page of your site. Make it simple for someone to enter a complaint and visible to potential guests that you are interested in guest feedback.

3. Follow Up Quickly and Try To Resolve The Issue
Collecting this feedback is no good unless you follow up. Some of the worst, most passionate, online reviews are from guests who feel that they were wronged and their voice was not heard. You certainly can’t please all of the people all of the time, but following up quickly can take much of the emotion out of their situation and maybe even prevent them from going online with their complaints.

4. Respond Online to Negative Reviews
When negative reviews are posted online it is important to respond. Simply, it shows potential guests that you care. No one expects perfection, and seeing a hotel take the time to address and thoughtfully respond to complaints gives that guest confidence that they will have a good experience at your hotel.

An effective review strategy is a critical part of a hotel’s marketing. These steps will help you avoid negative reviews, improving your presentation to potential guests. To read Mike’s full article visit:
http://blumenthals.com/blog/2011/08/11/review-management-7-tips-on-avoiding-bad-reviews/

Out of the Box Thinking on Hotel Vanity Websites

Posted on August 12, 2011 by eMax_Rick

Why would you pay for a website that doesn’t book room nights? Pay for Performance, offered by eMax Hotel Internet Marketing, is an innovative program that guarantees you only pay for the consumed room nights booked through your website. This performance based program ensures that eMax remains focused on your hotel’s primary goal: increased revenue. eMax only makes money when your hotel makes money.

Pay for Performance is the only program of its kind in the hotel industry. In the past year, it has generated incremental revenue for hundreds of hotel properties by gaining traffic from potential customers’ searched for activities and locations in the local area. The results can be dramatic. For example, in the first six months of 2011, the Crowne Plaza Houston near Reliant Park experienced more than 31,000 visits to their website, more than 75% of which came from search engines. “Choosing eMax for our hotel’s online marketing endeavors was certainly a smart business decision for the hotel,” said Jerry Mathers, Vice President of Operations and General Manager. “eMax has proven to be a valuable eCommerce partner.”

eMax hotel websites leverage market drivers from the hotel’s local area to capture traffic and drive revenues. Numerous landing pages are developed around unique market drivers, including tourist attractions, universities, hospitals and annual festivals, to provide broad visibility on search engines. A vanity website enhances a hotel’s web presence, maximizes traffic, drives conversions, and increases reservations.

“The Pay for Performance model that eMax offers is yet another innovative idea that allows operators to drive incremental revenue into their hotels. With no upfront costs, operators instantly increase their online exposure without having to consider ROI consequences”, said Tim Berg, Director of Operations Campbell Lodging. “eMax took care of us throughout the entire process starting with their professionalism at setup, regularly scheduled update meetings and requested changes made when we need them. The value received through the Pay for Performance websites are simply amazing and we continue to benefit from these websites every day at our hotels.”

The Pay for Performance program requires no upfront payment and there is no monthly commitment. There is no charge for web hosting, plus unlimited maintenance and updates to your website are included. Ready to explore this? Does your property need a revenue boost? Contact eMax at 407-998-8007 to learn more about how the Pay for Performance program can work for you.

8 Cool Facebook Places Campaigns

Posted on August 10, 2011 by eMax_Rick

Almost a year ago Facebook launched Places, their location based service that allows people to “check-in” on Facebook and offers businesses location based marketing opportunities. Although many hotels have embraced social media marketing in 2011, few are utilizing Facebook places to further increase their visibility and revenues.

The website All Facebook recently posted their list of “8 Cool Marketing Campaigns Using Facebook Places”. Here are a couple specific examples you should take notice of:

Discounts for Checkins

Westfield Valley Fair in Santa Clara, Calif. has given away coupons like 25 percent off any single item at Sports Authority or 20 percent off full-priced items at Ann Taylor for checking in at the shopping center.

What could you offer a guest for checking in at your hotel that would also further develop your relationship with them? 25% off their next stay? Buy One Get One Free entrees at the restaurant?

Daily Check-Ins

The University of Kentucky installed big, wooden Facebook icons on its campus to encourage students to check in at different locations around the school every day. Students used them to check in while on campus and at sporting events and the college is hoping it will help boost recruiting efforts for the students’ friends who are still in high school.

How could you use signage to creatively and effectively promote check ins to your guests?

Check In For Charity

Southwest Airlines did a holiday charity campaign last year where they made a $1 donation to the Make-A-Wish Foundation per check-in at any Southwest airport, capped off at $300,000. A similar donation program program, with only a fraction of the investment, could increase check ins and affinity for your property.

Facebook Places represents a significant untapped opportunity for most hotels. These examples should give you an idea where you can get started. To read the entire All Facebook article visit:
http://www.allfacebook.com/8-cool-marketing-campaigns-using-facebook-places-2011-08

Tour The New Google Places

Posted on August 4, 2011 by eMax_Rick

When Google made significant changes to their Places listings, it also changed the appearance of the listings as users see them. Here is a quick tour of a typical hotel listing on Places highlighting what is new.

The listing begins with standard information about the property pulled from the Google Places database and other sources. The most significant change here is the addition of a prominent “Write a Review” button highlighted in red. Since Google has largely eliminated 3rd party information, including reviews, from their listings they are looking to attract more of their own content via this type of promotion.

The “total reviews” count displays only the number of reviews on Google itself. For most properties this is a small fraction of the number of reviews Google used to display. In the case of this Embassy Suites there are only 7 reviews versus 307 just a few months ago.

Next Google displays their Book Now feature followed by photos. Little has changed in these 2 areas, the information for the Book Now continues to be fed by their PPC program for OTA’s and the photos continue to display 3rd party content with clear notations as to the sources.

The other area with significant changes is the reviews section. Again you see the clear call to action encouraging reviews on Google. Gone are the listing of reviews from other websites and gone are the excerpts from those reviews. You still see links to reviews on other websites at the bottom of this section, but otherwise the 3rd party content has been removed.

The last area that has changed is conspicuous by its absence. More About This Place, or citations, used to show mentions of a hotel on other websites. In their redesign, Google completely removed this content from their listings.

Remember that a change to the formatting of Google places does not mean a change to their local search algorithm. Still, given the visibility of this information on Google, any hotelier should be familiar with the content of a Google Places page, most of your customers are.

Google Launches Hotel Finder

Posted on August 2, 2011 by eMax_Rick

Search giant Google took another big step into the travel industry recently when they introduced their new Hotel Finder. The tool draws data from the Google’s Places database and offers a unique feature which allow users to draw a customized search area. Here is a quick visual tour:

Example of results for a search on Google Hotel Finder for Boston

When a user clicks on a specific property, more detailed information from Google’s Places database is displayed for that property.

By clicking on a property users see a more detailed listing

Finally, when a visitor clicks on the “Book” button at the bottom right of each listing they see hotel rates from Google’s Pay-Per-Click program.

The "Book" button displays rates from Google's pay-per-click hotel program

In addition to the custom map, the Google Hotel Finder contains some interesting features including:

Shortlist: allows users to easily select and compare a group of hotels they are considering

Fliters: Their price and Class & rating filters make it easy to narrow the focus based on a users preferences. I was able to quickly find the only 4 & 5 star hotel less than $250 per night.

What does this mean for hotels?

1. If you thought Google was done making inroads into the travel industry, you were wrong. You can expect for them to continue to experiment and look for ways to become the center of travel search. It is a natural evolution of their core competancies.

2. The quality of your reviews on Google just became that much more important. Through Hotel Finder, users can now filter out properties with poor average reviews on Google. Best practices have always involved generating positive reviews from guests across several websites. Hotel Finder is just another reason why it is critical that Google is one of those sites. Those hotels with a large number of positive reviews on Google will see significant benefits as Google, and it’s users, begin to rely more and more on Google content.

3. Google continues to leverage their pay-per-click pricing ads. When these ads were introduced on Google Maps the effect to an individual hotel was minimal. When Google rolled the ads out to their main search results things changed significantly. Now Hotel Finder makes it clear that Google plans to use these pay-per-click ads as their primary way to monetize hotel search.

It will be a while before we know if Google’s Hotel Finder gains any significant share of the hotel search market. Google itself labeled it “Experimental”; one would assume this is a step below their traditional “Beta”. However you can expect Google to consistently look for ways to improve Hotel Finder and expand their presence in the travel industry. As always, it will be an interesting ride.

Google Changes Places

Posted on July 29, 2011 by eMax_Rick

As Google continues to experiment with local search, they have once again made major changes to their premier local product: Google Places. Essentially, Google has stopped displaying 3rd party information on all of their local listings. This includes reviews from non-Google websites and citations, or mentions of a business on a website.

In the hotel industry this has quickly changed the appearance of hotel search results. In the past you would routinely see listings with 2,000 or more review based on information from sites like Trip Advisor and Hotels.com. Now, with only Google reviews being displayed, you are lucky to see 40 reviews on a hotel listing. A quick look at the search for “Orlando Hotels” illustrates the changes.

Places Results for "Orlando Hotels"

There is much speculation over the motivation for the changes. A pending FTC investigation certainly may have contributed to the move. For almost a year, review websites like Trip Advisor have vocally opposed their content being displayed on Google Places listings. For better or worse, they have gotten what they asked for.

When it comes to these changes, there are two things hotelier’s need to understand:

1. This is not an algorithm change
Just because Google stopped displaying 3rd party reviews does not mean they do not consider them for ranking purposes. In fact, everything points to the fact that Google has NOT changed their local search algorithm and that reviews, including ones on 3rd party sites, are a significant factor in local rankings. To improve your local ranking a hotel must have an effective strategy for generating reviews.

2. Diversify your review strategy
This is not a new idea. Encouraging guests to write reviews on a variety of websites has long been a best practice for hotels. Now the importance of reviews on Google is increased significantly. Although Google reviews may not influence rankings more than reviews on sites like Trip Advisor, Google reviews will clearly influence Click-Through-Rates. Within the 7-pack, a hotel with numerous, positive reviews on Google will get more clicks than another property with a low number of reviews or negative ones. To adapt, a hotel must incorporate Google into their review strategy.

Local search continues to evolve quickly and the only certain thing is that this will not be the last major change we see. However, the fundamentals of local SEO remain the same and any hotel who does the basics well puts themselves in a position to capture significant exposure and traffic.

Google +: 4 Things To Know

Posted on July 21, 2011 by eMax_Rick

Unless you have been on vacation for the entire month, you have probably heard about Google +, Google’s official entry into social networking. The launch has created significant excitement attracting more than 10 million users in just a matter of weeks. But what is Google+ and should you care? Here are 4 important things for a hotelier to understand.

1. Circles
What really makes Google + unique are circles. Circles are groups of people in your life: co-workers, family, fraternity brothers, etc. Unlike Facebook, Circles in Google+ are extremely easy to setup. Even more important, you can easily use Circles to control the content you view and share. A picture from the weekend can be shared only with friends while a company announcement can be shared only with co-workers.

On the viewing side it is easy limit your Stream to display only the content from a particular circle. Want to catch up with those crazy college friends? Select that Circle in your Stream and you see just their updates. You quickly see what is going on without combing through lots of other updates you are not interested in.

2. Feedback is Positive
Those early adopters generally have positive things to say about Google +. Coming to the game late gave Google the advantage of seeing what worked and what did not in the social media space. They have done a good job of identifying the weaknesses of Facebook and Twitter and addressing them in their product. Among the positive comments posted on Mashable by Google + users, the following stood out:

“The clean user interface of Google+, combined with the lack of distracting elements, or so-called features (such as all of the add-on games and apps on FB that clutter up your stream), that I never use, attract me to Google+. This, combined with the Circles feature, choosing who you share with, are the primary draws.”
~ Scott Davis

“If Facebook and Twitter had a baby, they’d call it Google+.”
~ Olaf Wempe

3. It is Too Early to Know Anything
Google + is still just in Beta. Although 10 million users is promising, it is still less than 3% of Facebook’s audience. Plus, there is rampant speculation as to exactly how engaged Google’s current users are. They may have setup profiles on Google +, but the statistics show that they are not returning and interacting regularly. In Beta this is far from unusual, but not promising either. Simply, it is too early to either dismiss Google + or crown them with any awards. We will simply have to wait and see.

4. Google Does Not Allow Businesses, Yet
Google has been very public that it expects to offer business pages within Google + in the near future. However, they are not available now and Google is actually cracking down on those businesses trying to circumvent the rules. For now we are left on the sidelines to see how Google + develops.

Social media continues to present interesting opportunities for hotel marketing. The engagement and ability to connect with guests on their own terms separates social media from other mediums. Google + is an interesting parlay into this space and based on early feedback it is certainly worth paying attention to. To learn more about Google +, try reading Mashable’s Complete Guide.

eTips

Sensible Internet Marketing Advice for Hotels

4 Steps To Avoid Negative Reviews

Out of the Box Thinking on Hotel Vanity Websites

Tour The New Google Places

Google Launches Hotel Finder

Google Changes Places