How Important Is Hotel Reputation Management?

Not even science fiction writers have seen it coming, but our lives are now completely integrated with the ‘’digital world’’, so to speak. We’re making friendships online, working online, shopping online, and even researching hotels online.

Online reviews and social media comments now hold the same power as personal recommendations. So if information about your business on the internet is nothing special, the number of bookings will most likely lag as a result.

This is why your hotel needs to maintain a stellar online reputation by implementing a hotel reputation management strategy.

What Is Hotel Reputation Management?



Your online reputation can be simply defined as the public opinion about your business on digital platforms. Due to the widespread popularity of the internet and social media, your brand reputation is directly affected by the content you publish, as well as the reaction and engagement of your users/customers.

For example, the reputation of your establishment can get derailed by negative reviews, social media comments,  poor PR campaigns, and any security breaches that went public.

Usually, traditional business owners understate the importance of hotel reputation management, but the fact is, online content has the power to affect public opinion.

According to studies, 77% of users always check online reviews when researching local businesses. The same study also revealed that 81% of users use Google as their main source of evaluation when looking at businesses online 

Benefits Of A Positive Online Reputation

Through a simple Google search, potential guests can gain all the information they need when deciding whether they’ll book a hotel or not. Since online reputation is critical for the decision-making process of modern customers, maintaining a positive image will help you with the following:

1. Increasing sales

Naturally, if your potential guests read mostly positive reviews about their stay in your establishment from people who spent time at your establishment, you’ll generate more business. Hotels with a high star rating will usually attract more customers than their low-rated counterparts.

2. Building credibility

Online review platforms and social media have given every customer a platform to share their opinion. Maintaining a positive reputation and implementing a hotel reputation management strategy will ensure positive word about your brand will spread faster than negativity. That way, you will seem more credible to potential guests whenever your name pops up online.

3. Increasing your online visibility

Addressing online reviews is not just about maintaining a solid reputation but also about increasing the visibility of your hotel online. Since Google and other search engines want to show the best content to their users, they will provide a significant advantage to high-rated businesses. In other words, hotel reputation management  will improve your online standing while also inadvertently helping you with your search engine rankings.

The Basics Of Hotel Reputation Management

For the benefits it provides, reputation management is not as complex as it appears. In basic terms, reviews of your hotel provide new customers with a firsthand experience of what your hotel can offer. 

This is why managing reviews takes precedence over other forms of PR that you may include in the future of your hotel reputation management strategy. Preferably, you should focus on the techniques such as:

1. Online review monitoring: keeping track of the discourse around your business online and monitoring a variety of review platforms such as Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor, along with social media reviews

2. Generating online reviews: increasing the number of reviews on different listings to project an overwhelmingly positive brand image

3. Online reputation repairing: addressing the negative content online to minimize its impact

How To Track Your Reputation Online

Typically, hotels have to track reviews and comments across different online platforms. Depending on the size of your business, this could turn into an arduous task that includes manual checks on different websites to discover new feedback.

To stay on top of the online discourse around your hotel while also saving a lot of time and effort, you should include specialized software in your main hotel reputation management workflow. 

For example, ReviewArm provides you with a unified dashboard that significantly simplifies the process of reputation monitoring. You’ll be able to manage and respond to reviews from all major review platforms from a single place. That way, there is no back and forth. You’ll get a notification every time you receive a review, and regardless of the platform, you can respond from the same dashboard without navigating different sites.

ReviewArm can also integrate with most scheduling and content management platforms, which is a huge plus.

How To Grow And Repair Your Reputation

Online reputation can radically change in a short period of time. With a hotel reputation management strategy, you can successfully increase your online standing, but you can also repair it if it was tarnished.

Here are the basics:

1. Send out feedback requests

While happy customers may forget to leave a positive review, unhappy customers won’t miss the opportunity to voice their frustration online.

This is one of the biggest challenges of hotel reputation management - by not generating enough positive feedback, the negative reviews (which are more likely to get posted) will quickly snowball and put a dent in your hotel’s reputation.

You can avoid this by merely asking your guest to share their experience. This drastically increases your chances of generating positive feedback.

However, there is still a possibility they’ll forget to do it once they walk through the front door. To lock down that review, you should implement automated feedback requests into your hotel reputation management efforts.

With ReviewArm, you can send out automatic review requests in bulk, or alternatively, automated requests once you process the payment. In doing so, your customers will receive a text or an email while the experience is still fresh in their minds and they’re at the peak of their satisfaction.

2. Respond to feedback

Responding to reviews is as important as generating them. Users nowadays expect to see more personality from a business, and if your reviews are left without a response, you’ll appear as if you don’t care about new customers.

This is even more necessary for negative feedback. The way you deal with unhappy customers can minimize the preview they left. By addressing these comments quickly with understanding and professionalism, you can even turn the tides in your favor. 

Ultimately, people researching your business will notice how you handled these issues and are more likely to book a room in your hotel.

Spotless Online Presence

Hotels have to deliver a spotless guest experience, day in and day out. With hotel reputation management, you’re making sure that the real-world experience is accurately reflected online. 

With the latest technology, the process is significantly simplified. By establishing a clear, automated process, you can have a successful reputation management strategy without wasting valuable human and time resources. 

More importantly, by making automation a cornerstone of your reputation management efforts, you ensure that the process stays consistent.

If you want to take your business to the next level with minimal effort, you need to give ReviewArm a spin. Click here to sign up for our trial.