SmartRental Collection Gran Vía Capital

Background

In November 2018, the hotel, among other services offered by Hotelinking, activated the during the stay satisfaction surveys and automated communications for the guest to post a review on the online reputation channels features. 

These features consist of:

• Satisfaction surveys during the stay: a form that guests are sent when they are still in-house. The purpose is to learn about their satisfaction and identify possible incidents that may cause negative reviews on opinion portals. In this way, it is possible to stop potential bad reviews that the hotel could receive, encouraging the positive ones instead.From the Hotelinking dashboard it is possible to set a cut-off score from 0 to 10, so that, if the system detects a survey with a score below the one marked, it will send an email alert to the hotel staff so that they can act and solve the problem.

• The email to post reviews on online reputation channels is a communication that is sent automatically to guests once they have checked out. In this, they are requested to leave their opinion on one of these leading websites: Tripadvisor, Google Opinion Rewards, Holidaycheck, Yelp, Tophotel or Zoover. When they click on the button in the email, it redirects them to the hotel’s listing on the online reputation channel that has been assigned to them based on their origin, where they can leave a review. This feature is key to improve visibility on online reputation rankings.

To better understand how we get our hotels to improve their positions on these portals, we have selected one of the most important online reputation websites: Tripadvisor.

We have prepared an article where we explain in detail how the algorithm acts to improve its rankings and how thanks to these two features you can get a hotel to climb positions: Examining Tripadvisor: How to Improve reputation and visibility in the ranking

Starting position

Before the implementation, in November 2018, the property had a 4.5 score with 743 reviews, being 76 % excellent and 16 % very good. It was indeed a positive scenario, but it was crucial to maintain to avoid losing competitiveness in an area with such a wide range of city hotels.

Result

Current position

After more than a year and a half with the satisfaction surveys and review email features activated, the number of comments increased by 28 %, from 743 to 947. A rise that has had an impact above all on the number of excellent and very good opinions, which have increased by 1 % respectively, representing 77 % and 17 % of the total. This 1 % assumes that the positive comments trend has been improved by 20 %.

Besides, throughout this time we have maintained its overall 4.5 rating without falling below the first seven positions in the ranking of 647 special accommodations in Madrid. This has been possible thanks to the fact that more than 3,200 people have responded to the satisfaction surveys that have been sent while they were still in-house, providing the necessary information at the right time to the hotel staff to solve any inconvenience that may have arisen, curbing negative opinions in reputation portals. 

On the other hand, more than 1200 emails have been sent to encourage guests to leave their opinion on Tripadvisor, managing to redirect more than 200 people to this page.