This Week in Hotels, Episode 16: A traveler’s perspective – with Darren Cronian of Travel Rants

Today we’re trying something new on This Week in Hotels – bringing on special guest Darren Cronian of Travel Rants to include his view from the traveler’s perspective. Listen to the show here:

[Prefer to listen on the go? Download the mp3 recording here]

On the call, we discuss….

• 02:02: Travel-Rants.com and  Travel Blog Camp
• 02:55: What makes Travel Blog Camp different from other conferences
• 04:53: Darren’s experience in booking a budget hotel in London
• 11:43: The importance of one angry consumer and what one person can do
• 12:55: The line between presenting your hotel in a good light and being honest about what it offers
• 17:28: Should your hotel feature user-generated photos?
• 19:07: How travel companies on Twitter can get annoying
• 21:17: Finding a human connection on Twitter
• 25:50: Using CoTweet.com with your Hotel
• 27:10: What’s the most common hotel complaint?
• 32:02: What small and independent hotels have to work on
• 32:37: In the mid-market, do customers buy the brand before the hotel?

A few excerpts from the conversation:

A different kind of conference

Guillame: You write a blog called travel-rants.com where you talk about the experiences from the travel you’ve had in the last 5 years and also give some tips to other travelers. At the same time you’re heading an event in London for the 3rd time. Can you tell us a bit more about this?

Darren: Yeah, it’s the Travel Blog Camp that I organize along with Kevin from Tnooz. Basically it’s a very informal social media gathering during the World Travel Market in London. It’s a very popular event and I’m really looking forward to the talks and discussions going on this year.

Josiah: Can you tell us what you’re doing a little bit different from other conferences out there?

Darren: I’ve been invited to a number of travel conferences and I’ve found them very formal. You sat there and you listen to somebody talk about their company. With the Travel Blog Camp, it’s very informal and very discussional. We have a lot of controversial debates going on. The first year we organized the Blog Camp, there was a very good discussion about journalists versus bloggers. Last year we had a lot of discussions and that’s what it’s all about. It’s not just somebody stood up in front of everybody. It’s also the audience getting involved, asking questions and sharing their experiences as well.

Josiah: How do you encourage some of those discussions? Do you have discussion topics that you want to be covered or addressed or does it just come up naturally?

Darren: I think it just comes up naturally. What we have is 3 or 4 speakers, they speak about the given topic, and we just have like a Q&A session and people can ask questions to the speaker and that just naturally creates discussion. That’s what I love about the Blog Camp and that’s why I love writing Travel Rants. It’s about creating discussions and sharing experiences.

11:43 – The power of one angry customer

Josiah: I think the biggest thing is many hotel managers and executives don’t understand the importance of one angry consumer and one person can do.

Darren: You don’t have to be a blogger or a writer. You’ve got tools like Twitter or Facebook and if you’ve got a lot of friends, you can put a comment about the hotel that was horrendous and before you know it, that information’s been spread amongst your friends and potentially friends of friends. Social media is out there and people have really got to grasp it, use it and monitor what people have to say about their hotel.

How to set the right expectations

Josiah: You also mentioned creating an expectation of one thing and then in reality, when you arrive at the hotel, it’s an entirely different experience. I see over and over again that that’s where a lot of consumer anger comes from. How do you set the right expectations to avoid that disappointment?

Darren: I think when you’re promoting a hotel you have to provide up-to-date photographs. From the photographs on the website, the hotel looked really nice for 55 pound. How do you that? Obviously you can do window and update the website on a regular basis. It’s all about meeting expectation and that’s probably the reason why most consumers will complain and leave a negative review: when that expectation hasn’t been met. With the hotel website, I noticed, the front photo of the hotel was of the upper level, which is very nice. The lower entrance is pretty bad. There was a lot of rubbish and bins around there and it wasn’t very nice. Again, in your mind, that’s what you’re expected to see when you get there and it’s not met your expectation. That’s when consumers write a negative review. That hotel location was fantastic, and what I noticed on a lot of the review sites, people were rating the location very high but the ratings for the room were quite low. But because the location was rated highly, the overall rating was flawed. If somebody saw the review site and saw a 7 out of 10 it’s not really 7 out of 10. The location is good, but the hotel isn’t. Do you get where I’m coming from?

Josiah: Exactly. It seems that for travelers who are less sophisticated in their research, they can easily be misled. I think it’s important for the traveler to understand what factors go into a review rating of a hotel and for travel websites, if they can break down their reviews to see which elements of the hotel are great and not so great. Then you can make your decision based on that.

Guillame: I’ve had this argument so many times. I always get the same feedback: “Why would I want to show bad stuff about my hotel? The pictures will always be an issue until pictures from the users will be more important than the pictures from the hotel.

Josiah: I think it’s also the issue of trying to maintain that balance between putting your best foot forward and the best possible, truthful representation of the hotel. You wanna have photos that look accurate but also look good but you don’t want to go so far that you’re misleading people. I believe the website Uptake has an interesting blog post series around a photo that’s been overproduced and it gives an inaccurate representation of the hotel and they put that side by side with a candid traveler photo. For any hotel out there I think it’s important to have great photos but make sure it’s telling a truthful story.

17:28

Darren: I’ve got a suggestion on how we could do that to some degree. I don’t think many hotels will do this but you can use something like Flickr. Create a group and ask your guests to post photographs on there. That way if you’re publishing photographs that’s been taken by the guests, yes you are going to get some nice photographs but if you’ve not kept the room tidy then you’re also going to get the negative photos as well. By having those photos on the site,  which are user-generated, people are going to have a lot of trust in what they see rather than just photos taken 5 years ago when the hotel first opened.

Josiah: Exactly and that’s good on two levels. One because it provides accountability for your staff and second is it provides more web content so you get more web visibility. You have that content on one more social network so anyone searching Flickr for a London hotel, for example, those photos will come up because you just have more content out there.

Let us know…what do you think about this new audio-only format?