As the global landscape is constantly changing, so are guest expectations. It is more important than ever to employ hotel listening tools to know what your guests are experiencing at your property.
This is where listening tools play a key role. They can help you to monitor, understand, and act to make guests feel safe and ensure your staff is following up on any new protocols.
Here are five ways that these types of tools can help you.
1. Keep an eye on what guests are saying
According to a recent study on our review data, 33% of guest reviews mentions cleanliness. As it seems to be an important subject to travelers, you should be monitoring concepts like hygiene and cleanliness to understand how you are performing.
Having a monitoring tool will also allow you to track any corona related concepts like plexiglass, hand sanitizer, temperature screening, social distancing, etc. Monitoring these concepts will allow you to measure how satisfied guests are with any new measures implemented. With these insights, you can continuously improve your strategy and operations.
2. Customized categories for customized programs
If you have spent time and effort devising specific cleaning protocols or campaigns, you will want to know if they are being mentioned. Create a specific category and gather brand-specific items.
One of our clients, Hard Rock Hotels has introduced its SAFE+SOUND policy. To not miss any comments coming in, they created a custom category, where they added concepts like SAFE+SOUND, and gathered existing concepts like temperature screening, plexiglass, etc. They filtered pages to only show this category and can now quickly check the status on their policy.
3. Use alerts to know when things go wrong
The last thing you want is that guests are experiencing cleanliness issues or that they are not feeling safe in your hotel… and that you’re not aware of it. You can set up alerts for your general manager so they are warned each time a negative review about your protocols comes in. They will always know what the situation is like in their establishment so they can step in when problems arise and avoid the situation getting worse.
4. Know what’s trending
In such a shifting environment, guests’ needs and expectations constantly change so it’s important to look ahead of the curve and see the bigger picture. For example, one thing that has changed in many establishments is the way F&B, specifically breakfast, is served.
If your breakfast is trending negatively, it gives you the opportunity to dig deeper onto the issue – maybe your guests didn’t know you weren’t offering breakfast anymore or maybe they’re not happy with the breakfast box you are offering. You can step in and better your breakfast options or advertise more clearly on your website and OTAs that due to Covid-19 breakfast is not served anymore. Setting the right expectations will help create good guest experiences.
5. Keep your properties close, but your competitors closer
Concepts like cleanliness, breakfast, Covid-19 policies, etc. are top-of-mind concerns for travelers. As they are looking for new accommodations on OTAs, chances are they are comparing your performance to that of your competitors. Dive into your competition’s mentions and reviews to see what their guests are saying about them for a particular category and what the experience is like at their establishment.
These days as review volume is dropping, guest feedback is gold: it’s the best way to know if what you’re doing is meeting guest expectations or not. Monitoring the content of your reviews will give you an idea of what is going on and give you the necessary insights to make the right decisions in the future.
