Responding to Reviews: Hotel Reputation Benchmark Report

Many hotels use industry benchmarks to compare their performance to their competitors’ and to identify improvements that will have the most impact. We’ve amassed a lot of data about online reviews in working with 23,000 hotel customers in 160 countries. So, we performed a deep dive into our online review data and analyzed more than 20 million reviews from 80,000 properties in 125 countries, and put together our 2014 Hotel Reputation Benchmark Report. This report is designed to provide benchmarking guidelines for hoteliers, so they can assess and improve their own performances.

For this section of the report, we looked at a subset of our sample size. This data includes reviews and hotelier responses on the 15 review sites that allow management responses.

This is an excerpt of our 2014 Hotel Reputation Benchmark Report. CLICK HERE to download your free copy of the report, and benchmark your hotel against data specific to your region.

Responding to Reviews: Global Review Pace and Response Coverage

Global Insights

• Categorically, there is a tendency to focus on five-star and one-star reviews. One- and five-star reviews had the greatest year over year increase.
• Response coverage increased the least on one-star reviews
• Hoteliers are responding to a greater percentage of their five-star reviews than one-star or two-star reviews.

Analysis

Consumers are increasingly turning to review sites to share their experiences with hotels. The volume of one-star reviews and five-star reviews increased the most of all reviews. Guests feel inspired to write about the extremes–either the hotel stay that went above and beyond expectation, or the experience in which the hotel or staff totally let them down. Hoteliers have recognized the importance of monitoring and responding to online reviews and are doing so more frequently, often despite time and resource constraints.

However, here’s an interesting thing to note: Many hoteliers aren’t allocating their time appropriately.

While the volume of one-star reviews has seen the largest year over year increase of any review type, hoteliers only increased their response to these reviews by 5%. But, their response rate to five-star reviews increased by 7.7%.

Given that the overall volume of five-star reviews is much greater than the volume of one-star reviews, it’s clear that on a global scale, hoteliers are spending much more time responding to five-star reviews than they spend responding to one-star reviews. This represents a potential misallocation of resources.

Ideally, hoteliers would respond to every online review. But we realize that not every general manager has the time to do so. While responding to particularly glowing five-star reviews is important and has its place, hotels should focus first and foremost on responding to all one-and two-star reviews, and then as many other reviews as you can, while still personalizing your responses.

Global Action Items

• Focus on responding to more of your one- and two-star reviews.
• Respond only to particularly glowing five-star reviews if you have time and resource constraints.
• Use sentiment analysis to gain instant operational insights on review data.

This is an excerpt of our 2014 Hotel Reputation Benchmark Report. CLICK HERE to download your free copy of the report, and benchmark your hotel against data specific to your region.