Attracting Guests in 2016: What You Need to Know to Improve Your Hotel's Online Reputation

Building a hotel’s reputation can be a long process that involves years of exemplary service and painstaking work. Even after creating a successful hospitality brand, maintaining the brand’s image can also be a challenge. This has never been more apparent than in today’s fiercely competitive world of social media and marketing campaign wars. As you probably know, even a few negative reviews can significantly harm the positive image your property has been carrying for so long.

With the cloud enabling almost anyone to access enterprise-level tools, competition has shot through the roof – even amongst independent hoteliers. If your property has been witnessing a plateau or decrease in bookings, you might want to step back and rethink some of your strategies for the upcoming year. But it doesn’t have to be hard!

In fact, your hotel might just be a few simple steps away from rediscovering its best form! Here are a few areas you might need to take another look at –

1. Social Media

The importance of social media today cannot be overstated. This is where millions of travelers share their views and form opinions about hotels around the world and it’s not enough to just have a presence on these sites. Actively engaging users with thoughtful posts and pictures forges a stronger connection with your followers. By making your followers more interactive on your page, you generate more direct bookings through your social media booking engine and web booking engine too.

2. Distribution Channels

OTAs share a complicated relationship with hoteliers. While they do spend millions of dollars a year on marketing and advertising on the behalf of all hoteliers, they also charge significant commissions for every booking. Over-reliance on these platforms is a mistake that many hoteliers have made and as soon as their property’s channel ranking drops, bookings take a massive hit. That’s why the best approach is to build and maintain multiple avenues for bookings – such as social media, your website, travel agents and even offline channels.

3. TripAdvisor and Reviews

Negative reviews can have a hugely detrimental effect on your hotel’s short term and long term occupancy and even a few negative reviews can tip the scales. That’s why monitoring your TripAdvisor profile and encouraging guests to leave a review could be the game-changer your hotel was lacking. With Trip Advisor’s Review Express tool, this is simplified further – when integrated to your PMS, the tool is alerted when a guest checks out, and sends them a review request via email.

Improving a property’s online standing is not an overnight process and requires patience, something all hoteliers are bound to have plenty of anyway! With time, you won’t fail to see a noticeable boost in your online bookings and occupancy.