Managing Hotel Guest Complaints on User Generated Travel Websites

By Hillary Bressler, CEO

User-generated content has exploded over the Internet, from blogs to Wikis, from MySpace, to YouTube. Travelers have taken to the web in record numbers and are now providing real-time, real experience, no-holds-barred travel reviews of their first-hand experiences.

A traveler's experience is viewed as more powerful than an advertisement or even article; people trust other peoples' experiences. People that travel also love to talk about their experiences to their friends, family and co-workers; they want to tell you what was absolutely fabulous about their vacation, and they also want to tell you what went wrong. All of these experiences make for good story telling at their next cocktail party or at Monday morning’s gathering around the water cooler.

Thanks to consumer review websites, where users generate their own content, travelers now have the power to reach far beyond the water cooler; these sites allow them to post their comments and leave what I call a "digital footprint." Their comments have the potential to reach thousands of people and influence their purchasing decisions, good and bad. A hotel with a bad review will see their occupancy plummet, but a good review will help reservations and increase ADR by building-up occupancy.

We are seeing now that 25% of all hotel bookings are being made online, and another 25% are made offline but are influenced by online research. So if your hotel can chance 50% of its revenue by ignoring user generated reviews, you are truly one of the few lucky ones; most hotels want to see every reservation make it through to the guest's head hitting the pillow!

As a result, every hotel should consider putting in place an on-going system with an individual from the hotel responsible for monitoring consumer websites and seeing what comments have been made, good or bad, about your hotel.

If you find out that you have many negative comments, obviously it would be a good idea to address those problems internally and improve your hotel in the areas that guests are complaining about.

If you feel that comments were made unfairly or there was a valid reason for the error, I would suggest that the General Manager go into the site where the complaint was made and note why the problem occurred and that it has been addressed and fixed.

For example, if a guest goes online and posts a complaint that there was no heat in room 203 and your hotel had a problem with your heating system, then post a response and explain that you had an issue that day, and it was taken care of immediately after the problem was brought to your attention. Ensure the online posting notes that the posting is coming from the hotel and is written in a professional, non-threatening way. This kind of message is best written coming from the General Manger or an equivalent person.

To help garner more positive comments on your hotel, try to encourage happy customers to comment online. If you have unhappy customers, cater to their needs until they are happy – that's customer satisfaction 101. But in today's digital world that the angry customer can tell more than their ten friends by posting online, customer service needs to take front seat. If you get threatened by a technically-savvy guest, and they tell you that they are going to post some negative comments online, then I would make sure you cater to their needs immediately; a posting online can reach thousands, and go past a person's immediate circle of friends and acquaintances.