No reviews, less bookings

Here comes TripAdvisor alongside with PhoCusWright and reveals their study results on the connection of reviews and bookings. So I hear a lot of people saying reviews become less important, people are saturated, but the truth is 53 % of travellers won’t book you, if you have no reviews. That is more than half of your potential guests. You don’t want to miss out on so many bookers, do you? Getting started on actively collecting online reviews is not as hard as it might sound to you first place.

More interesting facts from the study:

 #1

80 % of travellers read the most recent reviews

Good news! For all of you, who started collecting reviews years or months ago, remember the early days where you received far more critical feedback than now? You listened to your guests’ feedback and improved here and there according to their needs and now your reviews are the perfect mirror of your service.

 #2

6 to 12 reviews are taken into account

Glad to hear! It is not that you need to have hundreds of reviews. Try to encourage new reviews and even if you only generate a few a month, we all know it is better than having none (see #1).

#3

87 % of travellers have a higher opinion about a hotel, if the management replies in an appropiate way to negative reviews

Let’s face it we are human and we all do make mistakes. You have to break an egg to make an omelette! Now the important part is don’t try to cover mistakes or even worse ignore them for it won’t make life easier for you.

Picture this scenery, which you most likely have encountered in person at your hotel in the past. A guest shows up at the front desk completely unhappy with your service. Chances are high, that he gets a little loud. Now have you ever succeeded and calmed the situation with a defensive, aggressive respond or by  ignorance? I doubt.  Listen to him and show him that you are honestly sorry for what happened. You will see the outcome in many cases is a very positive one. He might even thank you for your help and gives you a smile. Now Social Media is not  the mystery land that you believe it is. Everything you do in a spoken way, can be easily put into management responses to online reviews. Just keep a few simple things in mind: do not copy & paste, be authentic and only apologize if you really mean it. Don’t play people for a fool! Users easily  get it when it is words without meaning. I don’t know about you, but I would rather like to stay at a hotel, where I know that if things go wrong – remember we are human  – the staff takes good care of my issue. I am in good company here as 70 % of the participants of the study feel the same way.

#4

64 % of participants don’t pay attention to extreme reviews.

This is like the best news ever for the weekend. People actually know the difference between a single opinion of a notorious complainer and the common opinion of the majority of your guests.