Upon receiving the cake, I found that it was a strawberry cheesecake. So, as any of us would have done, I called the bakery and complained about the incorrect order.

The bakery’s owner noted my complaint and ensured to take corrective action about it. After half an hour, I was informed that they were sending two choco lava cakes to compensate for the earlier miss.

Now two things are worth noticing here – 

1. The wrong order ruined my customer experience
2. The apology gift increased my customer satisfaction

See, I was upset about the cake I got earlier, but receiving the new ones made me happy. This incident was a compelling factor in making me a loyal customer of the bakery.

I would even recommend it to my friends. 

The hospitality industry also works on these two verticals – Guest experience and guest satisfaction.

In this blog, we will dig deeper to understand guest satisfaction in hotels.

What is guest satisfaction in hotels?

Guest satisfaction in hotels is the measurement of how happy and satisfied your guests are with your products and services. It depends on three Q’s: Quality, Quantity and Quickness.

Let me explain this to you with the help of a scenario. You booked a stay at a hotel. Upon reaching there, you are allocated a suite room with a view of the magnificent Pacific Ocean. 

The room is well spacious, ventilated, and filled with ample amenities to make your stay a comfortable one. Even the room service and housekeeping are lightning-fast. 

With the above scenario, you can say that you had quite a satisfactory stay. Your experience was good and it was worth the investment. 

Let’s reverse the entire case. What if the room is small and missing essential amenities? How would you feel if the services are as slow as molasses? I am sure you would be disappointed.  

So, you can see that the quality, quantity, and quickness of a hotel’s services do leave an impact on guest satisfaction in the hospitality industry.

How is guest satisfaction measured in hotels?

Measuring guest satisfaction in hotels isn’t rocket science. All you need to look at is your hotel’s reviews and ratings.

You can assess guest satisfaction in two ways:

1. Use GSS (guest satisfaction survey) forms
2. Check online reviews

GSS forms assist in recording guest satisfaction scores at the individual property level. This data is available with the hotels only.

Earlier, it used to be a paper and pen method to record responses. Nowadays, a  link is shared with the guest to provide their feedback and rate their services on different parameters.

You can club all the feedback together and check for your average rating. 

Alternatively, you can check your hotel’s online reviews across all the OTAs. The best way to do this is to use online reputation management software. 

It saves you time and effort. Browsing every OTA individually and making a note of points is a hectic and time-consuming task. 

Instead, you can let the software do this work for you. It would provide you with a hotel’s daily performance report on each OTA.

It will showcase the guest satisfaction of each category separately. It could be room amenities, food quality, the hotel’s ambience and much more. 

Based upon ratings, guest satisfaction score has five levels – 

5 Star - Very Satisfied 
4 Star - Satisfied 
3 Star - Neutral 
2 Star - Dissatisfied 
1 Star - Poorly satisfied

So, you can easily check how satisfied your guests are and start working on improving it.

How to improve hotel guest satisfaction?

Certain factors affect customer satisfaction in the hotel industry; either positively or negatively. You can use 3Qs to ensure that the services offered to guests are top-notch.

Here are some easy ways to improve guest satisfaction in hotels.

a. Give a personal touch to their stay

“The single most important thing is to make customers happy. If you are making customers happy, as a side effect, they will be happy to open up their wallets and pay you.”

Derek Sivers, Founder CD Baby

That’s true. A bit of attention towards guests can do wonders. 

When I say personal touch to their stay, it implies assisting them during the entire stay. All you need to do is greet guests warmly and ask how their stay is going on, or if they are facing any issues. 

This simple gesture will give you early feedback about the guests’ experience. You will be aware of any issues the guests may be facing and have enough time to rectify the problem. 

It will eventually result in a better guest experience, thereby improving guest satisfaction in your hotel.

b. Quickly resolve guest complaints

As I said in my previous blogs, ignoring guest complaints is fatal. It could be either one shared by guests during the stay or in the form of a negative review on any OTA.

But ensure you keep a record of these complaints and provide an on-time resolution to them. For in-house guest complaints, you can instantly take corrective actions.

However, for the complaints, which are in the form of negative reviews, it’s a bit tricky. I would recommend addressing this issue personally. 

Initially you can reply with an apology for the inconvenience caused to them to calm down the situation. Post that, you can connect with guests over the phone or by mail. 

If possible you can provide a complimentary service as a gesture of goodwill. Trust me! This step works like a miracle. 

c. Don’t ignore feedback and suggestions

Whilst you are replying to reviews, you should work on those feedbacks also. Every feedback is a learning lesson. Be it a positive or a negative review.

The positive reviews will give you factors that can give you an edge over your competitors. Meanwhile, the negative ones are potential areas that need prompt attention.

These reviews are actual mirrors of your hotel. Once you start working on the services with the lowest ratings, it will automatically increase your hotel’s guest satisfaction score.

d. Offer rewards to loyal guests

Let me tell you one of the best experiences I had with a loyalty program. A couple of years back, a new cloud kitchen chain started operating in our city. 

One fine day, I saw its promotional ad on Facebook and gave it a try. The food was so great and at such reasonable prices that I recommended it to my entire office.

Guess what happened after a month? I was ordering for almost half the office daily. Soon, I reached the required benchmark to be an elite member. 

I received enormous benefits from that membership. Buy one get one free offer, a gift of hazelnut brownie on every alternate order, free delivery and many other amazing deals. 

Similarly, hotels need to create attractive loyalty programs to attract maximum guests as well as retain existing ones. 

Once you enroll guests in the loyalty program, you can offer them multiple rewards on reaching a milestone. When guests achieve the required criteria, they can receive benefits as free room nights, weekend packages, tickets to an event happening in a hotel, and such likes.  

This will leave a good impression on the guests.

Quick-tip: If you don't want to create a loyalty program, you can opt to give a farewell gift to guests at their check-out. 

e. Stay in touch with guests post-checkout

Even after check-out, guests remain your potential prospects. It’s advisable to stay in touch with them after they leave your premises.

The initial post-stay activity is sharing GSS forms via mail or WhatsApp. Hotels using chatbots can program them to deliver this service.

As I said earlier, you can work on the feedback they share. Apart from this, you can keep your guests engaged by sharing on-going offers, their loyalty membership rewards, upcoming events, and much more.

f. Keep your staff happy

“Employees who believe that management is concerned about them as a whole person – not just an employee – are more productive, more satisfied, more fulfilled. Satisfied employees mean satisfied customers, which leads to profitability.”

Anne M. Mulcahy, CEO XEROX Corporation

I do believe in this quote. When I used to work as an intern in Lemon Tree Hotel, I was treated like a family member.

Even for a second, they didn’t let me feel like a temporary employee. In fact, I remember an incident that made me feel lucky to be a part of the hotel staff.

I had my grandparents visiting my workplace. So, I showed them around and took them for lunch in our hotel’s in-house restaurant. 

I had ordered a complete meal for them and expected an employee discount on the bill (Well, I was earning a stipend but not enough). But, when I went to make the payment, I was informed that lunch was on the house. 

It was a great feeling. And the next day, I was working happily with high enthusiasm. Eventually, it resulted in providing guests with extraordinary services.

So, you need to treat your employees in the right way. Listen to them, ask for their suggestions, reward them for their services and they will be cheered up all the time. 

This will impact on services your guests receive. Over the time it will improvise your guest experience, thereby increasing hotel guest satisfaction score.

g. Invest in technology

Technology is a vital tool in improving guest satisfaction. From AI-enabled chatbots to implementing voice-controlled gadgets, hotel tech has advanced at a breakneck pace. 

As predicted by many hoteliers, ROBOTS are the future of hospitality. But that day is still years away.

But talking about the present scenario, you need to invest in hotel technology to improve guest satisfaction. It could be a basic thing such as tablet-based room service. 

It will help guests to request room service over the tablet. It could be ordering food, room cleaning or any amenity they want to use. 

Many hotels have AI-based chatbots installed to assist guests with activities they can enjoy at the hotel. You can opt for other options as well, such as a self-service kiosk, contactless payments, virtual reality tours and others.

The post Guest Satisfaction in Hotels: 7 Ways to Improve It appeared first on eZee Absolute.

I am still unsure whether it was out of anger or if she agreed with my thoughts (I guess it was the earlier one). And you know the rest.

All I am saying is, that every statement has a certain emotional value to it. As humans, we tend to do a sentiment analysis of everything we read.

Even in the hospitality industry, every review portrays certain sentiments, and it defines hotels as good or bad. During reputation management, this sentiment analysis plays a pivotal role. 

I can sense multiple questions popping up in your head. So, let me take care of them. Here’s an informative blog on the sentiment analysis for hotel reviews.

What is sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis (opinion mining) is a process of classifying the polarity of a statement. Depending on the text or phrases pertaining to specific emotions, there are positive, negative or neutral statements. 

Every review that guests post on any platform is considered for sentiment analysis. It assists in deriving the positives and negatives of any hotel.

Unlike NPS (Net Promoter Score) which uses ratings to assess any review, the sentiment analysis focuses on their content. 

With the assistance of machine-learning and deep-learning, the system is updated for various terminologies and phrases to classify the statements. To process feedback, the four main factors taken into consideration are:

1. Precision 
2. Recall 
3. F1 Score 
4. Accuracy

The initial three aspects use a certain algorithm to evaluate the hotel review dataset for sentiment analysis. Meanwhile, accuracy helps in gauging whether the analysed data is correct or not.

What are the benefits of doing sentiment analysis for hotel reviews?

Well, every industry is now adopting sentiment analysis to assess its reputation in the online market. The hospitality industry is following the same path with hotel reviews sentiment analysis.

Let’s find out about the benefits your hotel can derive from them.

a. Gauging hotels reputation in the market

One of the primary benefits of using sentiment analysis is knowing your hotel’s reputation. Most of the reputation management software uses a combination of NLP, NPS, and machine-learning to evaluate a hotel’s reputation.

The reviews from all the booking platforms you are listed on are collaborated to form a dataset. This data is then further narrowed down into three different sections using sentiment analysis as positive, negative, and neutral. 

Once the data is sorted out, certain metrics are used to calculate the reputation score of the hotel. It is then compared to the scores of compset to determine your hotel’s value among your customers.

b. Understanding a hotel’s flaws

Every statement which falls into the negative category has a phrase associated with services that guests dislike. Let’s consider an example of a negative review:

The hotel staff was quite rude to me when I complained about the unclean room being.

If we analyse this review, we can clearly understand that the guest is not happy with two things –

• Staff’s behaviour
• Dirty room

So, the hotel can take corrective actions to ensure that other guests don’t face the same problem. Eventually, every review in which guests have maligned services of the property is a learning lesson.

c. Analysing competitors

You cannot get financial records of your compset for analysis. However, with the sentiment analysis of hotel reviews, you can assess their reputation in the market.

Many reputation management software has a feature of competitor analysis. Once you update your compset in the system, it fetches feedback from all the sources and gives you a hotel review analysis report. 

This report consists of the praised and criticised aspects of all your competitors. You can utilise this report during SWOT analysis to understand the opportunities. 

d. Reviewing all data in a single go

You need to have a large amount of hotel review dataset for sentiment analysis. As I said earlier, you can utilise feedback from multiple reviewing platforms. 

It saves your time as well as effort, to look out on every review individually. Moreover, bulk analysis of feedback highlights your most critical and appraising factors.

How does the sentiment analysis for hotel reviews work?

Well, there are many techniques for sentiment analysis of hotel reviews. Yet, NLP (Natural Language Processing) remains the most used in all the reputation management software. 

To describe briefly, NLP analyse the text or phrase used to define the quality of services mentioned by the guests in reviews. Based on the nature of the word, the feedback receives its classification. 

The NLP based systems have keywords programmed in them to process the reviews. 

Let’s consider the below example for better understanding:

“The hotel room was clean and well maintained.”

As we can read, this review highlights the good aspect of the room. Now terms such as clean room, fabulous location, nice ambiance, and similar define a positive review. Considering such terminologies, this falls into the positive category.

“The food served in the hotel was terrible.”

Looking at the statement above, we can gauge it as negative feedback. Why? Because it’s criticising the quality of the hotel’s food.  

Terms that show the poor aspects of hotels relate to negative feedback. It could be an unclean room, unpleasant ambiance, rude staff, and such likes.

With the use of machine learning, this database keeps on upgrading from time to time.

What are the challenges faced during the sentiment analysis for hotel reviews?

As they say – Every cloud has a silver lining.

Sentiment analysis definitely is one the best method to classify any review. However, it has its own set of limitations. 

Here are some of the common challenges faced by the hotels:

a. Multilingual reviews are problematic

Sentiment analysis has English as the primary language for reviews. In fact, the words programmed in the systems running on NLP are in English only. 

It creates a barrier while analysing reviews that are in any other language. Although, with Google translation now being available on platforms, they are easier to read. Yet, Google translate is not 100% accurate. 

If there is a slight change in meaning, it will cause multiple errors in the sentiment analysis.

b. Tone of reviews

NLP is a part of technology. It can’t understand the exact emotions behind the statement. Sometimes, the review has some sarcasm used to complain about the hotel. 

However, the sentiment analysis considered the adjectives and adverbs to classify the review. Here’s a review with sarcasm for your reference:

"The hotel room was so neat and clean that it made me wonder why I forgot my broom at home."

As a person, I would read and understand the sarcasm behind it. But the software would pick up two main words from the review  – hotel room and clean.

Based on these two words, it would process the review and mark it as positive. I know, it sounds a bit stupid. But, it’s a technology and needs a rework in these areas.

c. Incapable of analysing complex statements

We have yet another drawback in the sentiment analysis of reviews. See, the system understands simple statement such as:

1. We had a mesmerising experience.
2. The hotel staff was helpful.
3. The rooms were unclean.
4. The food at the restaurant was terrible. 

However, when it comes to analysing a complex statement, NLP lets us down. Let’s consider an example for better understanding:

"Even though there was a bit of noise due to the road's construction, we had a pretty good experience."

When you and I would read this statement, we know it’s a positive review. However, the sentiment analysis considers two different factors:

1. Noise due to the road’s construction
2. Pretty good experience

With both positive and negative points in a statement, it would classify it as a neutral review. This definitely can cause lots of errors. However with time, this issue will be resolved.

The post Here’s All You Need to Know About Sentiment Analysis for Hotel Reviews appeared first on eZee Absolute.

Now, this review on the internet can make or break your hotel’s online reputation.

You might be wondering, “Really?” 

Generally, hoteliers assume that the guests look at positive reviews only. But, it’s just a misconception. 

Apart from positive reviews, people also check on how the hotel has addressed the guests’ issues. Your online reputation directly influences guests’ decision of booking a room in your hotel.

I would recommend you to invest 10 mins into this blog. It will give you a detailed insight into hotel reputation management.

What is the online reputation for hotels?

Your reputation is what others think of you; your character is what you truly are. Reputations can be manipulated; a character can only be developed and maintained.

Bohdi Sanders

Online reputation is the way in which your hotel is perceived among guests across the web. If people consider your hotel in a positive way, you have a good reputation or vice versa. 

The ratings and reviews across your web listings and your way of interacting with them are used for analysis. Based on this your hotel’s reputation scorecard is prepared. 

That being said, you need to understand the parameters on which it is calculated.

How is a hotel’s online reputation measured?

There are two ways of measuring your hotel’s online reputation – 

• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)

NPS is quite an easy way of knowing any hotel’s reputation score. It takes into consideration the ratings of a review for analysis. 

If the rating is 4/5 or 9/10 and above, it is considered a promoter. 

Whereas, a rating of 3/5 or 6 to 8/10 is considered as a passive review. 

Detractors, in this case, are reviews with ratings of 2/5 or 6/10 and below.

Promoter denotes that particular feedback can improve your hotel’s online reputation with good ratings. While a detractor review tarnishes your image.

NLP is an artificial intelligence (AI) based way of calculating the reputation score. Here, instead of ratings guest sentiments are used to create the report. 

For instance, words with a negative impact such as pathetic, bad, worst, horrible and so on denote unfavourable feedback. Whereas, words with a positive sentiment such as amazing, great, good, decent and others are signs of a favourable review.

Many hotel reputation management systems use both ways for providing accurate reputation scores.

What are the effects of hotel reputation management on bookings?

You must be aware that the reviews are co-related with your booking flow. Similarly, your hotel’s reputation score is directly proportional to your online revenue generation.

It is responsible for your property’s ranking on various OTAs. If you have a good reputation score, it improves your position in search results and visibility on the online booking platforms. Whilst a poor score results in a lower ranking and zero exposure among the customers. 

It’s quite obvious that the guests are inclined towards booking property from the top 10 to 15 search results.

If your hotel is not on this list, it is due to the low review count and their poor management. This eventually leads to the creation of a negative brand image.

As per research results published by researchgate.com

The majority of respondents (79.4%) are concerned with providing a positive image about hotels, and they are very disappointed if the hotel has a negative image (70.6%), besides, they recommend their friends to visit/deal with their hotels. 

This shows that if you have a bad image online, it can lead to a loss of 70% of guest bookings. If you calculate it even for one day, this volume seems quite high. Now imagine this on an annual basis. It sounds scary, right?

So now you know, that hotel reputation management, if done poorly directly affects your business on a larger scale.

What is the importance of reviews in hotel reputation management?

If you are in a competitive industry, great online reviews are not just nice to have, they are a requirement! 

Tom Kenemore

Online reputation without reviews is like a hotel without a room. You can’t have a performance report based just on a couple of reviews. 

Collecting more reviews can give you a better insight of your property. The user-generated content (UGC) will help you to provide points for the scope of improvement. 

Moreover, this UGC is a trust creating factors for your potential customers. It gives them a check. First of all, it helps them understand any hotel’s relationship with its guests. Secondly, it acts as a window for them, to see what’s actually inside the hotel.

A research conducted by TripAdvisor had quite shocking results – 

Be it positive or negative, ensure that you collect the maximum number of reviews and ratings for your hotel.

The positive ones will boost your rank and create a good impression on your audience. Whereas, the negative feedbacks are also important, so that you can work on the criticized aspects of your hotel. 

How can you master in hotel reputation management?

Now that you have an idea about online reputation, it’s time to think about how you could improvise it. Here, I’ve listed some easy ways you can implement for better results. 

1. Reply to reviews

One of the prime tasks in hotel reputation management is replying to the reviews. It shows your concern for the guest experience. Especially the negative ones. 

The way you respond to your hotel reviews creates an impact on your brand image, across various hotel booking sites. 

As far as the reviews are positive, replying to them is quite an easy task. But, you need to be very careful while handling the negative ones. 

A straightforward or blunt reply can create a negative impact on your guests. Try getting in touch with guests directly, to solve the issue on a priority basis. And keep the response for this review on the neutral side.

You can refer to these templates for replying to guest feedbacks.

2. Work on improving negative points

Now that you’ve your property’s performance report, it’s time to start working on the negative feedback. Focus on improving the criticized issues of your hotel. 

Align issues as per high to low priority. Give attention to the ones which have ruined guests’ experience the most. Once you’ve resolved that error, move on to the next. 

Eventually,you’ll find a rise in positive reviews and a huge drop in negative ones. This would automatically improve your hotel’s online reputation.

3. Beware of the fake comments

It’s not necessary that all the negative reviews you receive are genuine. Sometimes, the guests may post a false review about your hotel. You need to keep a check on such reviews.

It can be out of any personal grudge or maybe a trick to enjoy some free benefits from the hotel. Try to address such comments.

Let your guests know the truth about that particular situation. If possible reply with relevant proof. Also, you can flag them out as inappropriate reviews. So any potential customers reading it will be aware of this fact.

4. Impart good experience

Being from the hospitality industry, I can understand that keeping guests happy is not an easy task. Hoteliers work hard, day in and out. 

However, you can ensure that their experience is not hampered by any internal factors. None of the guests will like such a thing to happen. 

Often, things may go haywire due to unexpected events. Try to make up for them. Guests like it, when hotels take one extra step to ensure that their stay is flawless.

This will give you an edge over your competitors, and you’ll be in good books amongst your guests.

It’ll directly impact the feedback shared by guests. A good experience by them will bring you more positive reviews and good ratings. And it will eventually boost your reputation score.

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