Making sure your hotel is in consideration for online bookings is more important than ever before. By 2029, 80% of revenue in the hotels market is forecast to be generated through digital.
How can you prove your service is worth the experience when customers have so much choice?
Outstanding customer service in the hotel industry is paramount. When guests have a great experience, not only are they more likely to return, but they will be encouraged to tell others about it.
Ensuring constant online visibility and showcasing authentic social proof is a simple yet effective way of increasing the volume of traffic and getting a higher number of bookings.
In this blog, you’ll find 4 key points to help increase your online presence – helping you boost bookings and better improve your service.
- Implement a hotel SEO and PPC strategy
- Use hotel guest reviews to improve your brand reputation
- Listen to your customers to improve your hotel’s services
- Discounts and offers drive travel and tourism bookings
Implement a hotel SEO and PPC strategy
A customer can only book your hotel if they can find it. With a large number of booking journeys beginning on Google - investing in your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is essential to helping potential clients find you.
Hotel customer reviews can be an intelligent way to support your SEO strategy – especially from a verified platform that has a partnership with Google, such as Feefo. Regular new, relevant content adds value to your ranking, demonstrating trustworthiness and illustrating expertise.
It can also reduce bounce-rate, keeping visitors on your pages for longer, and improving domain authority.
Additionally, the star rating of your hotel customer reviews can be displayed in a snippet next to your page, offering at-a-glance validation of the quality of your venue.
IMAGE
The higher you appear on the search engine results page (SERP), the more likely it is potential customers will click to your site– with those listings that manage the treasured 1, 2, 3 positions receiving the lion’s share of these.
Reviews can also be used to boost PPC Click Through Rates (CTR) by up to 17% - further increasing your visibility and supporting SEO efforts.
Top Tips
- Identify the most used keywords used by reviewers of the hotel and incorporate them into a keyword strategy to help rank higher for relevant terms.
- Target specific demographics with PPC campaigns (Use review content from people similar to those you want to target).
- Incorporate review content across all customer touch points to offer social proof. Using easily embedded, regularly updated widgets is a simple way to do this.
Use hotel guest reviews to improve your brand reputation
A business can live and die by the experiences it provides, and the feedback that inspires, both good and bad. In fact, a remarkable 97% of potential guests use hotel reviews to help in their purchase decision, according to research by Accor.
Obtaining this customer feedback can provide useful information to both prospective guests and the hotels themselves, with both positive and negative responses providing value.
Responding to negative reviews is as important as showcasing the positive ones. 44% of people who have left negative feedback would use the business again if they receive a reply. Understanding a hotel cares enough to respond can make a huge difference.
Some of the best review platforms for the travel industry include:
Tripadvisor
Often seen as the first port of call for travel plans, Trip Advisor offers broad visibility on an open platform for visitors to leave their feedback on their experience.
Booking.com
The most visited travel and tourism site in the world . Booking.com’s reviews are usually requested after the guest has checked out. They’re only sent to customers that have booked through the Booking.com platform.
Google is the where the majority of searches start. Google reviews will directly impact your local SEO. They also integrate with third-party review platforms, including their stars and customer feedback for hotels in the displayed rankings.
Feefo
All the reviews gathered on the Feefo platform are from verified customers, so all feedback is based on genuine experiences. This ensures reviews gathered can help improve brand reputation and hotel customer satisfaction. In addition, they offer an advanced analytics platform which can provide detailed insights and sentiment analysis on the reviews. This allows better informed business decisions to be made, based on real customer experience and genuine data.
Top Tips
- Encourage feedback – ask for it!
- Monitor and respond to reviews.
- Showcase positive reviews on the website.
Listen to your customers to improve your hotel’s services
Customer reviews aren’t just about boosting your SEOP presence. Every review is left because someone wants to tell you (and others) about their experience.
Paying attention to what’s said can help you identify areas for improvement, spot opportunities and even use them as a basis for rewarding your team for providing great service.
British Airways holidays employed Feefo to improve brand advocacy, also using customer submitted photos and detailed reviews of the holidays as part of a User-Generated Content (UGC) led marketing campaign.
Flight Centre Canada used the insights from reviews to identify problematic trends. While primarily using Feefo to collect NPS scores, they noticed that scores were dropping. They analysed the review comments and found that lower response times were the main reason. This enabled them to fix a small issue and prevent it from growing, by hiring more staff and improving rostering, so responses times were improved.
Top Tips
- Ask relevant, specific questions post trip.
- Use an analytics tool – such as Feefo – to track both customer sentiment and industry trends.
- Review the reviews – optimise the hotel customer experience based on the feedback.
Discounts and offers drive travel and tourism bookings
Encouraging direct bookings is the most effective way to best reflect your values and provide an excellent first impression of your hotel.
Offering incentives, such as a free breakfast or a discounted next stay can persuade people to book through your site.
Likewise, a hotel customer loyalty programme such as Best Western Rewards or IHG One Rewards can generate repeat stays: points mean prizes!
Alternatively, consider running a ‘VIP’ loyalty scheme, where repeat stays are rewarded with room upgrades or gift baskets. Offering customer-centric perks is a great way to engage with guests, making their stay and experience more personal.
Top Tips
- Review competitors’ pricing strategies.
- Use email and social channels to promote the loyalty programme, offer perks and discounted stays.
- Be clear with pricing and ensure your website has relevant information easily available and prominently displayed.
IMAGE
Collecting feedback is more than just stars. Asking guests what they think about your hotel opens up travel insights, helping you understand what went well and more importantly... What didn’t.
This allows you to identify opportunities for improvement, and improved customer experience. In turn this leads to better reviews, and ultimately, higher numbers of bookings.
Feefo have been helping companies in the travel sector grow their business through feedback for over 10 years. Brands such as Cottages.com, Riveria Travel and Eurocamp have all benefited from verified customer feedback. If you’d like to understand how it could help you, drop us a line and one of our friendly team will be in touch.
