Online Hotel Reviews Determine Your Vacancy Rate & Profit

Hotel reviews aren’t just a vanity metric — they’re an important indicator of profit and long-term success.

In the hospitality industry, the customer experience is paramount to all else. If you don’t have positive hotel reviews to back up your marketing claims, expect occupancy rates to drop and average daily rate to follow. Online hotel reviews aren’t merely important; they’re paramount when it comes to maintaining your hotel’s digital reputation.

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Reputation: It’s All Your Hotel Has

As all hoteliers know, reputation management is a skill that can’t be learned on the fly. You have to masterfully craft your reputation from day one, with no lapses in monitoring. It’s a constant responsibility that ultimately determines your future, and online opinions of your guests are at the core of what’s transmitted digitally to future potential customers.

Reputation management can be broken down into three stages:

  1. The foundation stage: building a positive view of the hotel when it first opens
  2. The growing stage: maintaining an excellent, superior image in the court of public opinion
  3. The responding stage: reversing and recovering when customers have a bad experience or there is a marketing error

If you handle stages one and two correctly and combine them with excellence in all other aspects of hotel management, stage three isn’t a place you’ll have to visit.

It Starts with Web Traffic

Online hotel reputation management comes down to the number of reviews the hotel has and the quality of those reviews. Ultimately, the main benefit of having hotel reviews in the first place is because more reviews mean more web traffic.

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Fifty-three percent of consumers will not book a hotel that has no online reviews. When hotels display reviews on their website and integrate review content with their own, their website is crawled up to 200 percent more frequently. The more traffic directed toward your site, the higher the likelihood that some of those online visitors will become guests.

Reviews Guide Online Behavior

Second, when the online guest opinions are positive, they direct booking behaviors positively as well. Here are some statistics to back it up:

Your Behavior Guides Online Behavior

Beyond simply having positive reviews, there’s another factor at play: how your hotel responds to online reviews. Travelers don’t just want to hear from other travelers. They want to hear from you too.

Seventy-nine percent of travelers say if hotel management responds well to a bad review, they feel reassured. Seventy-eight percent say if hotel management offers thanks for a good review, they think highly of the hotel.

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Constant maintenance of your hotel’s online reviews is essential. It’s part of how you craft a customer-centric image of your hotel’s priorities.

Positive Reviews = Success

Researchers at Cornell University’s Center for Hospitality Research studied the impact of online reviews on hotel pricing, occupancy rates and overall revenue and found that a hotel’s online reputation is powerful.

A 1 percent increase in a hotel’s online reputation score translated to a 0.89 percent increase in price, a 0.54 percent increase in the occupancy rate and a 1.42 percent increase in revenue per available room.

The data backs it up — positive online feedback means more guests and more money.

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We’re Here to Help

Accrue Reviews assists hoteliers with online reputation management by providing a user-friendly system for requesting, reviewing and posting hotel reviews. Contact us today if you’re ready to take control of your hotel’s online reputation — we’re here to help.