The shift in power from Hotels to Consumers, and its impact for your brand

With the surge in popularity of Social Media like Facebook and Twitter, more and more brands are putting in place dedicated people for Social Media Marketing. TripAdvisor, for example, has tens of millions of reviews and opinions by travelers. All reviews cant call your hotel the best in the world. Some will be negative :-)

Hotels do their best to get customers. They produce the best brochures, get expensive photographers to plan and shoot elaborate photos under the best lighting conditions with smiling models and well laid out tables and rooms, and hotel website designers develop beautiful hotel websites. Customers traditionally trusted hotel websites and brochures completely, but with increasing competition, some hotels spent a lot on the first step – beautiful websites, but forgot the most critical steps – maintaining a great hotel property with all the amenities promised, delivering excellent customer service from the moment the customer checks-in till the customer checks-out, and delivering value-for-money without ripping off the customer.

With the shift in power from the hotel to the consumer, many hotels have come under scathing attack from consumers. Negative reviews on TripAdvisor, Facebook and Twitter have embarassed hotels. Guests talking about rude customer service executives, dirty toilets, smelly rooms, stale breakfast, incorrect location description. Guests have uploaded realistic photos that customers trust more than the photos taken by the hotel.

If you have only positive reviews and none that are negative, customers may believe that the positive ones are fake. Monitor your Online Reputation to get fake reviews out, but respond quickly and maturely, and address the issues raised in negative reviews – Your customers will trust your ability to solve problems.

Many hotels will (and do) pay in some form to post positive reviews about their own property, and negative reviews about their competition. This will be done by paid employees or third party service providers. Customers will learn to give less importance to such tactics. The winning hotels will be the ones that focus on actually delivering excellent customer value and service. While this may not ensure that you will get only positive reviews, most of your customers will walk out happy, and that will ensure long term business !