After the success of the Travel Technology Europe Show in London last February, Reputize barely had a few days to rest before tackling #ITBberlin. ITB is the world’s largest tourism trade fair receiving more than 115,000 visitors from some 185 countries. We were honoured to have the opportunity to present our reputation management solution to this platform on such a global scale.
Our own Business Development Director, Alexander Krustev, was a featured speaker at the eTravel World convention. eTravel World is an exclusive area for digital marketing, social media and mobile travel services where established companies and ambitious start-ups present their innovations. Experts highlight relevant developments from the world of apps, mobile websites, social networks and blogs.
At ITB, our business development director Alex spoke at the full eTravel theater about how to turn guest reviews into hotel revenue, which is something that Reputize has become a skilled master in. We can achieve this for hotels by applying the Reputize formula: Review Analytics + Surveys + Hotel Marketing Strategy tools. We start by monitoring all social media and online reviews for a hotel and its competition so that hotels can benchmark their position. Our analytics board does not only give hotels a clear and honest picture of their current situation and trends over time but also allows them to receive alerts and respond to reviews right from the dashboard. The next step in the process is to add an additional review channel to hotels by providing them with a tablet running an interactive survey app. The tablet captures guest feedback on-site and those reviews contribute to a noticeable increase in the overall response-rate and data accumulation. In the final step, Reputize pushes the guest reviews to OTAs such as Tripadvisor, Holidaycheck, Zoover, etc. so as to boost hotels online review pool and impact direct bookings.
How do we know it works? We ran a beta trial with 100 hotels and made some breakthrough discoveries. First and foremost, we realised the great power that on-site feedback has. The hotels using the tablet survey solution managed to address customer issues before the clients left the property. This personalised approach lead to a positive impact on reviews. Furthermore, the total number of reviews collected via a single tablet proved to be on average 15 times more than booking.com, TripAdvisor and all other feedback channels (such as, paper surveys and interviews) combined. When all these predominantly positive reviews were then being pushed to online channels, 80% of the hotels in the trail pool experienced improved rankings with OTAs which led to an increase in booking conversion rates. And last but not least, we managed to provide an ongoing feedback flow, which proved to be invaluable. Fresh reviews matter as 44% of travelers say a review must be written within 1 month to be relevant.
If you’d like to explore this issue further, get in touch with our team for a free demo.
Thank you to all those who visited our stand at ITB and the amazing response and feedback we received. We are now more motivated than ever to keep up the good work.