May 19, 2011

Unlike traditional office employees such as myself, hoteliers are rarely at their desks. The good news for me is that my desk looks out at the Golden Gate Bridge and I never tire of the view. The better news is that I rarely miss a tweet or post because I always have a monitor with Revinate showing my mentions. For hoteliers, it's a bit more difficult to stay on top of mentions so I thought [...]

Best Practices for Dealing with TripAdvisor's Popularity Index

Last week, Gary Vaynerchuk's book, The Thank You Economy, hit the shelves. For those of you that don't know Gary, check out his site and watch some of his videos. Yes, he's a wine guy but he is also an extremely savvy businessman that has built his business on customer service in the electronic age of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. I recently saw Gary interviewed about his new book on Morning Joe and the first [...]

Last month, MIT published a really interesting article called When Unhappy Customers Strike Back on the Internet that looks at why people turn to the internet to voice their complaints. In addition to explaining why people complain about companies, the article also helps brands understand how they should respond. In a nutshell, the authors find that "customers go online because (1) they are victims of a "double deviation"; and (2) they feel betrayed." A "double [...]

Last week I was one of the thousands of travelers who had to deal with flight cancellations and delays because of the winter storm. I was scheduled to fly from JFK to SFO on Wednesday morning but I received a flight alert on Tuesday morning that my flight was canceled. I tried calling the airline but was unable to get through to a person due to high call volume. I tried to change my flight [...]