Revinate Quoted in Tnooz’s TripAdvisor Story

Revinate‘s own VP of Marketing Michelle Wohl was quoted in today’s story, published by Tnooz.com, on “The effect of ReviewDirect on TripAdvisor rankings” and offers some industry perspective on whether or not this system is fair to hoteliers. Michelle’s take is at the end of the story. Her quotes are also below:

The bottom line is that reputation is a real driver in consumer booking decisions and hotels need to focus their attention on it and do everything in their power to be well positioned online.

TripAdvisor is very clear that its algorithm for their Popularity Index takes into account frequency of reviews, freshness of content and quality of reviews.

This algorithm has been constant for quite some time and we train our clients to focus on these drivers to ensure the best results on the site. Hotels that focus on service and drive reviews do outperform hotels in their market that don’t proactively manage their reviews.

Any hotel – branded or independent – has the power to be highly ranked if you have a great, high quality product that people want to review. So, while pushing reviews to TripAdvisor will drive up the number of reviews on the site, a hotel still needs to focus on quality for it to pay off.

Today, reviews play a powerful role in improving the operations of a hotel. Our clients don’t just read and respond to reviews. They use the feedback to make operational improvements, base capital improvement decisions upon it and see it as a way to get closer to their guests.

You don’t need a paid product to drive more public reviews. In your post stay emails you can easily encourage public reviews with a link to TripAdvisor (or any review site or OTA). However, if you want to analyze your feedback and understand where you are doing well against your comp set, an automated solution, like Revinate, will help you operationalize feedback and show you what your guests love about your property and where you need to focus resources.