Why I Prefer Online Reputation to Quality Certifications

You will forgive me for making this personal, but I tend to be too much of an advocate on these issues to bring others into it. I am referring to matters of quality, certifications and online reputation. Has anyone ever stopped to think what a quality certification is actually for? The truth is, I have, and I still have not found any appreciable benefit. Given the way the business is structured today (the business, yes), quality certifications serve to decorate the entrances of the establishments that hold them, and little else. Sometimes they are a bureaucratic procedure that hoteliers (let us refer to them as such) have to comply with/endure. At other times, they fulfil a poorly understood promotional approach, whereby these certifications are expected to play a role for which they were neither created nor designed. ICTE, which oversees the Q for Quality, recently announced that, after a three-year effort, from 2005 to 2008, it had succeeded in getting 30% of the population to recognise the mark. What seems clear is that the approach behind these certifications is not the most appropriate. First of all, guests do not know what criteria are used to award these certifications, so they almost have to take the hotelier at their word—which is precisely what guests are trying to avoid: stopping buying promises and gaining greater certainty when making a purchase. On the other hand, there is excessive bureaucracy. Not long ago, a hotelier friend told me about his troubles with the process of obtaining a quality label, which, incidentally, was compulsory in his area. He told me how consultants had been sent to advise him on obtaining the quality label and that, when he asked them to provide the criteria required to obtain it, they replied that they did not yet know them. So what criteria are these gentlemen working to and advising me on? my hotelier friend wondered. By contrast, online reputation has a number of characteristics that make it very useful:

• It comes from the guest. It is the guest who determines whether an establishment is good or not, and they know which criteria they use to do so.
• It is dynamic. It changes and evolves as guests’ opinions evolve, allowing us to gain first-hand knowledge of the information we need in order to evolve ourselves.
• It is micro-segmented. Each guest has their own opinion, enabling us to create smaller groupings with more precise targets.
• It spreads virally. It has great reach, whether as a written opinion or, above all, as video. This can be very interesting if what is being conveyed is a positive opinion.
• It is proactive. It is a good management tool because it allows us to act according to opinion and to try to influence it through appropriate responses to the views expressed.

What seems clear is that quality certifications have now fallen behind and should be redefined and reinvented. Today, reputation is the source of information that guests follow.