Don’t Shoot the Messenger: Why Hotels Must Embrace Online Reputation
It has been a few days now since we read the news about a group of hotels preparing to sue TripAdvisor over the damage caused by customer reviews, arguing that they are not truthful.
To be honest, alarm bells rang when I read the article. Firstly, because some hoteliers acknowledged that, in order to prove the lack of truthfulness of the reviews, they had themselves generated fake reviews.
It is more than obvious that, of all the reviews, the only ones that bothered these hoteliers were the negative ones, and under no circumstances do they question the truthfulness of reviews that, whether created by them or not, were favourable to them.
This is a sector that is highly predisposed to ‘shoot the messenger’ before carrying out a thorough assessment of the situation. It is a congenital condition of the hotel industry.
I remember that years ago, ‘the Internet was the enemy’ and had no future. I myself have heard hotel business owners say that ‘they did not want their hotel to be on the Internet’ or that ‘it was a passing fad’, as one distinguished professional said, who today offers search engine positioning services to hotels.
A little later, comparison sites, metasearch engines and channel managers became targets of hoteliers’ anger, and nowadays everyone wants to be on them or at least gain an advantage from them.
Stop managing isolated systems. Start managing the whole hotel.
HotelGEX connects guests, operations, Revenue, F&B, Groups & Events and Management into one intelligent hotel context — so every decision starts with a clearer picture.
Trying to take action against TripAdvisor because it makes you look bad is like trying to eliminate Google because you rank poorly after having done no optimisation work or search engine positioning management. Ultimately, I believe there are few hotels today that do not recognise the benefits of good search engine rankings, so there is no case for seeking Google’s removal; instead, hotel business owners have chosen to optimise their positioning.
In my view, the same applies to TripAdvisor.
The moment hoteliers understand the benefits of having a good online reputation, they will understand that they should focus their efforts on optimising their presence rather than fighting the channel.
To do so, they must first accept that fake reviews may indeed exist, just as there are hoteliers who choose unethical or inelegant techniques to improve their search engine rankings.
Secondly, they must recognise that a website that has managed to attract millions of visitors each month does so because it is genuinely offering information of interest to those users. Users need to share and be informed, and users themselves know when they should believe a review or not, whether it is positive or negative.
Thirdly, hotel business owners must accept that they cannot pay minimum wages to their frontline staff, fail to refurbish their facilities for more than 20 years, offer no added value whatsoever, and emerge unscathed from all this in the eyes of the end customer.
In the end, although hoteliers may believe that they are the ones billing the customer, it is the customer who presents the bill for an unmet expectation.
I do not believe the lawsuit will succeed, and even if TripAdvisor were removed, its millions of users would look for another place to vent their frustrations. Perhaps this is why companies are appearing online that are positioning themselves as providers of reviews and want to pick at TripAdvisor’s crumbs, but perhaps that is a subject for another article.
I recommend that hotel business owners do not waste their time: focus their efforts on customer orientation, provide good service, manage their presence on TripAdvisor, and they will see that, in the end, they will sell more and make more money.
This article ends here. The archive does not.
Lead Hospitality brings together 1200 English articles published since 2018: years of experiences, decisions and lessons you can keep exploring.
What would you like to explore next?
Choose a direction and keep reading around what you want to solve, learn or challenge.