Cutting through the noise of guest reviews: a radical proposition
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Many hotels have hundreds of guest reviews on sites like TripAdvisor. They often range from detailed, high quality reviews from doting fans to angry tirades from cranky guests.
How is a traveler supposed to sort through all this noise? Do you trust the positive reviews, or suspect they are planted? Do you trust the negative reviews, or think that these people wouldn’t be happy in Shangri-La?
If anyone knows about customer reviews, it would be Amazon.com. The world’s largest online retailer pioneered guest reviews from day one (in 1995), and sparked what has become an important part of online culture today. Last year, they started featuring the most helpful positive review next to the most helpful negative review.
(Amazon review comparison - click for larger image)
By letting the community vote on how helpful each review was, Amazon is able to present a balanced, helpful review that is very helpful in decision making. It’s been called the 2.7 Billion Dollar change.
Why couldn’t this concept be applied to hotels & the travel industry? To my knowledge, none of the major OTAs are offering this.
TrustYou has a nice model of how this could look. Here’s my photograph of a slide from their presentation at PhoCusWright@ITB Berlin:
Slide from TrustYou at PhoCusWright presentation
I’d love to see a hotelier with enough moxie to post TripAdvisor’s most helpful positive review and most helpful negative review on their website. People know that no hotel is perfect, so presenting a balanced view gives credibility. If parking is difficult or the location isn’t close to major attractions, admit that up front. You’ll adjust your guests’ expectations, and then you have a credible platform for sharing real, helpful solutions.
Sharing the most helpful negative review is that it could potentially turn away guests that aren’t good for your hotel. There are often angry reviews that have more to do with the reviewer’s mood than the hotel itself. For this reason, an emphasis would have to be placed on constructive criticism.
In light of new research that 84% of American consumers are influenced by reviews, this is an important topic to consider.
What do you think – would this build useful credibility, or is it going too far? Is it something you would try at your hotel?
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I wish my former boss would take a look at this. I think if she gave more credibility to guest’s complaints and compliments she would have seen what a fantastic job I did for her and her family’s company. I will be sharing this with my new general manager.
The one difference though is that the reviews on amazon.com are of products sold, not the company itself. If you don’t buy, say, a book because of a negative review, that doesn’t mean that you or others who read your review won’t use amazon.com to buy a different book. When you receive a negative review of your hotel (whether it be the room, employees, or their overall experience) it can have an effect on how many room nights you generate. Also considering how often hotels are updated to brand standards or undergo renovations or even new management, it is actually wiser in our industry to post the most recent review rather than the most helpful. Therefore guests can get an idea of whether or not the problems listed in past bad reviews were actually addressed by the management. The most important thing about bad reviews is management learning from them and making changes!