Responding to Tripadvisor reviews of your hotel

Aleks Grzegorzak in Bookassist's Dublin office asks: "Have you checked reviews of your hotel at Tripadvisor website yet? "

Whether you like it or not, your previous guests like to share their opinion with friends, and the same applies to the Internet where social media websites allow them to share their experiences publicly with others. The only difference is that this time your guest shares his or her opinion with millions of people all over the world. The most popular website with reviews on hotels and vacations is www.tripadvisor.com.

The good news, however, is that this website allows hoteliers to respond to reviews.

There are already over 15 million reviews at Tripadvisor. Over 20,000 people visit the website daily for advice on hotels and vacation. Reviews online are a very important part of your web presence and it is up to the hotel’s general/sales/reservations managers to either monitor reviews and take appropriate action to control their image online or ignore them and allow themselves to be condemned for the image being created by somebody else.

Think: If somebody insults you in front of others, don’t you respond appropriately? If somebody compliments you, don’t you say thank you? The same rules apply to online reviews so take responsibility and act today. And remember to respond to both negative and positive reviews. It can be a great way of customer relationship management, too! You can do this in a few very easy steps.

1. Go to www.tripadvisor.com and write a name of your hotel in the search box provided:


2. It can yield more than one result, so find your hotel on the list and click on the link ‘Reviews of Your Hotel’ (highlighted in blue):


3. The link brings you to your hotel’s profile with reviews below:


4. Below the reviews there is a green frame for hotel’s owner with a link to the owner’s page (highlighted in blue):


5. The link brings you to the next screen with further links. Click on the ‘Respond to a review’:


6. The next page has a few drop-down lists where you can choose options of your choice:


7. Respond!

And remember you can set a Google Alert for your hotel page also so you can be informed when any new review is added.

Aleks Grzegorzak is Internet Support Coordinator in Bookassist's Dublin office

Managing negative online reviews

With Travel2.0 and the rise of customer generated media and content, Bookassist has been providing the option of showing genuine reviews as part of the Booking engine services, by genuine I mean reviews from people who have actually booked online and stayed at the hotel. We highlighted the growing need for this sort of "openness" online in the Bookassist Seminar on April 9th in Dublin in particular.

Hotels though are justifiably worried about putting reviews online, especially anything with negativity. This is understandable, but as we have pointed out in many different forums, these reviews are going online anyway whether you like it or not, so it is better to row in behind it and actually put them on your own website also so you can manage them appropriately.

Here's a brief article from Marketing Pilgrim about managing negativity online that gives some pointers. See Marketing Pilgrim